Simple Words

Hyundai Wins on Sunday

2010-02-07T21:43:00.000-08:00

In today's Super Bowl broadcast Hyundai did something simple, rare and powerful. Their ad entitled "Paint" elegantly focused on the primary meaning of "Sonata", their sedan's name. It names Mozart's sonata and Schubert's sonata, then compares to them with Hyundai's Sonata. No empty fluff here, they point to their rigorous painting process as proof that like the music, their car is "meant to last." Okay, maybe some fluff, but it's nicely done. Cool classical sound track too.

Why don't more car companies - or any companies - make specific use of their cars' names to overtly link to the connotations the names so carefully evoke? It adds to the relevance of the names and makes them more memorable.

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Simple Quotes

2010-01-27T20:48:00.000-08:00

Simplicity is one of my favorite concepts. Complexity creates barriers to understanding and effectiveness. "Too clever by half," as the Brits say. Simplicity allows the basic building blocks to be seen and understood. Here's what some others have to say about it.

"I'm turning my back on "sophisticated formulations" and "tightly argued," logical presentations. I'm focusing instead on "common sense stuff" that I've picked up over the years—and presenting it in as straightforward a way as I can." -- Tom Peters

"I believe to my marrow that we fail to achieve excellence by failing to obsess on the basics." -- Tom Peters

"The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder how it is generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

"The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective." -- Warren Buffet

"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." -- Winston Churchill

"Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated." -- Confucius

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

"Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Best Tool Might Not Be the Newest One

2010-01-14T20:34:00.000-08:00

A CEO I knew used to say, "Our job is to convince the customer that we have his software and he has our money." As marketers, our job is to connect customers with our company and to find the right tools or mix of tools to do so. All of the options in advertising, public relations, social media, events, websites, viral videos and such are all just tools. Bland, lifeless tools with no intrinsic value other than as different paths to our customers. To favor one or another simply because it's new, or because "it's what we've always done" is way off the mark. We need to understand these tools in order to use them well. Let's embrace the new tools' abilities to do new things and add them to our tool belts.

I bought a new chisel for my stone carving hobby and couldn't wait to use it. But you can be sure I did wait until I actually needed to do what it was designed for. I look at the new social media the same way. Just as I look at traditional advertising the same way. It's irresponsible to spend our employer's or client's money on a program that doesn't reach the intended audience or meet your marketing objectives. Want to reach a huge number of broadly defined market segments? Super Bowl TV here we come. Want to develop thought leadership among your employees, suppliers, partners and most avid customers? Here's a blog platform we'll have up by dinner time.

Let's not let zealots distract us with "the new economy" and their bias for certain marketing behaviors. Let's remember that simply put, we have customers and prospects who need to learn about our company and it's wares. Pick the right combination of tools considering every possible option and we'll be getting the most out of our marketing resources. And that's a marketer's job, after all.

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The Army's Only Ship: Leadership

2010-01-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

The notion of leadership is enjoying prominence in business. Like other popular topics it suffers from broad interpretation and careless misinterpretation. Just as we used to hear "you don't get it" with total quality, customer satisfaction, six sigma, outsourcing, branding, etc., we now have trouble with leadership. This is precisely because the concept of leadership has high perceived value and very low specific meaning. Let's try to fix that here.

The military have honed their definition of leadership over the centuries and may well be the most authoritative source for how individuals influence groups. For the last 50 years the U.S. Army has gathered up their best leadership ideas in The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual (book or PDF 4.33MB). Excessively simplified, the premise comes down to this: "Be Know Do."

Be refers to the leader's character and values.
Know is the leader's competence in technical skills and people skills.
Do is where the rubber meets the road: action. Good upbringing and good learning are useless if the leader doesn't act.

What's that spell? It means that the core principles of leadership are very straightforward. Maintain your integrity, know what you're doing, then do it. You're a leader. Of course, leadership is a lot messier than this. Some leaders are much better than others. 'Twas ever thus. But remember "Be Know Do" and you can be more effective with your group. Or lead a meaningful discussion the next time someone tells you that you don't get it. You also have the basis for the "thought leadership" proposal you're about to recommend to your company. If you hit the three points you'll advance your brand.

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Branding + Marketing = 1

2010-01-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

Rummaging around John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing site I saw an interesting post on branding and marketing. John's focus is on marketing insights for small business and he likes to keep it simple (my favorite word) for business owners who don't have marketing as their day jobs. John presents some practical definitions of branding and marketing:

Marketing is getting someone who has a need to know, [to] like and trust you.
Branding is the art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable.

But the major point for me comes later in his note:

If marketing is doing then branding is being. Often the two are so integrated strategically and tactically that it’s hard to say one comes before or is more important than the other.

While a case can be made that defines marketing differently from branding, it's more useful to stand back and see that good marketing and good branding are interchangeable. We marketers should resist the urge to further define and dissect the arts and sciences of our profession.

We need to keep it simple when we explain ourselves to non-marketers and resist the urge to build impressive complexity. They don't care about and don't need the subtleties. In my view, it's all about reputation. Marketing is building an effective reputation, and branding is pretty much the same thing.

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Are New and Different Either?

2009-12-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

Years ago I heard that snowmobiles pose a special danger by pushing the consequences of bad decisions from inconvenient to fatal. Suddenly people got lost farther away from home than they did with snowshoes. Rescue became more difficult.

These days we have some new technology in the blogosphere. Most of us incorporate it with our other marketing efforts. Though some of us seem too giddy and without enough perspective. We hear that emergence of A-listers, blogs and podcasts will replace a big marketing staff, a huge budget, a PR agency and elaborate press events. This seems breathlessly naive. What happens when four of your competitors get to the A-list bloggers first? Why, you crank up your marketing staff, increase budget, hire an agency and throw an event. The arms race is on. This isn't technology. It's how we humans go about our business. Let's not get too enamored with the tools without looking deeper at the fundamentals.

Blogs and FaceBook are not important. The conversation is. Conversations are things that humans do. Twitter, blogs, iPods, fax machines, and cuneiform tablets are just tools that help that ancient human activity.

So let's get excited about the technology and tools around us and keep our feet on the ground. Humans and our culture change far more slowly than technology refreshes. Let's look at we need to communicate and choose the right technology. Let's keep our bearings as we ride our new technologies into the woods.

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Who Named This?: Swipe

2009-12-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

What's the biggest concern of any credit card holder? Yes, credit theft. So why does the credit card industry promote the word "swipe" for using the card? "May I swipe your card?" asks the waiter before disappearing in the back room. "Yes, please," we say. What did we just agree to?

How about "slide" or "glide" or "scan" or "use"? Why choose a word with such blatant, negative connotations?

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Turning Words into Sword

2009-11-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

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The Wall Street Journal wrote today about a new U.S. Congress effort to create an opposition to Iran's current rulers. Their secret weapon? Words. Rather than add more economic sanctions or increase the political pressure coming out of press offices, the Congress is working on a bill to give Iranians unfettered access to the Internet and all of its communications tools such as Facebook and Twitter. These are the very means by which many Iranians were beginning to protest recent election problems prompting their governement to cut off access. By recognizing the revolutionary benefits of simple communication, Congress has discovered the real power of these tools that we take for granted in the West.

It's an example we can use in our companies when doubt is cast on the importance of social media and effective communication with and by customers and employees. Internal community platforms harness this power to the benefit of the company to overthrow competitors. External communities also reap the benefits for their participants and the companies that enable it. Companies that shy away from the strength of these communications risk a competitor doing it first and stealing the benefits. We've always heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. It's still true.

The Now in Knowledge

2009-11-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

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What's the future of information? Unlimited, I believe. All of the emerging technologies and new social patterns around them are all formed around information. Sending, receiving, multiplying, syndicating and federating information. In fact, they consume more and more information as the new technologies become more efficient and more widely adopted. As the world becomes more complex marketplaces need more information to make sense of it all.

There are different kinds of information, of course. Jeremiah Owyang and I took a first pass at parsing the different kinds at lunch today. Simple enough to do, but the distinctions may be helpful in making sure that we marketers conciously address the different kinds and rush to fill the gaps that are identified.

Conversations
This is the ultimate user generated content. Twitter, Facebook, even email are primary examples of this unstructured, spontaneous and direct information. Most important to marketers, it's highly believable and largely unavailable to them. Though most advertiser-funded services do give marketers access to sidebars next to the user's own writing, no one except the user is in the content itself.

Content
This one's defined a little more broadly than perhaps it should be. Think of standard brochure-ware websites. This is the stuff that we marketers have been building since 1995. It's vendor-generated and most customers view it as a necessary affliction if not an outright evil. We still produce terabytes of it.

Knowledge
Here's where it gets interesting. If there's been a revolution in user generated content, why not an equal revolution in vendor generated content. Imagine that your CTO or a sales executive or your online community manager is fully engaged in conversations with interested visitors and prospects. The informal and ephemeral nature of these conversations makes it difficult to present deep background or complex concepts. Even if one of your team has the chops to do that, it's a waste of time to repeat that information in the multiple conversations. Better for your company representative to establish mutual interest and then provide a pointer to the prepared knowledge that resides somewhere on the web.

Sure it sounds like more brochures and white papers, but it has to be more than that. It has to be what brochures and white papers should have been. What's required here is a qualitative improvement in relevance, writing and availability.

Possibilities
What's the thoughtful reference work that matches pace with the revolution in user generated content? Is it simply a well considered and consumable white paper? Does it rely on new or uninvented technology? What can marketers do now to be relevant and useful to the conversations that our customers rely on more and more?

Let's think about that. With a category called "knowledge", we can define it better and use it to improve the information that we're all creating. What do you think?

Big Companies Are People Too

2009-11-11T21:46:00.000-08:00

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Big business. Corporate executive. Profit. Capitalist. Pro-business.

I cringe when these words are used as self-evident insults. Perhaps a residue from the counter culture thinking in the 1960s, this belief that “business is badness” doesn’t hold up to critical thinking. Or even any thinking at all.

Let’s look at some fundamentals:

1. Each business – large or small – is a collective effort to turn time and skill into value that a customer will pay for. No value? No customers and no business.

2. The people who work for a business earn wages for building their lives and wellbeing. No income? No employees and no business. Each business benefits its customers and its employees or it goes out of business. Which business benefits the most customers and the most employees? Well, I guess that would be a business with the most customers and employees. Some might call that “big business,” no?

3. To stay in business a company needs income to be greater than expenses. No profit? No business. That’s right, profit is necessary to benefit customers and employees. Note that a “big business” benefits more customers and employees than a small business.

So let’s examine what these facts might imply to those who want to kick big business with a knee jerk. Home Depot’s plans to build a new store might not be derided as big business ruining a neighborhood. It might be seen as a valuable service (see Fundamental #1, above) that will benefit the people who live there with broad selection and low prices. If the people of the neighborhood really don’t want Home Depot then they’ll vote with their dollars and the store won’t be there long. Remember, if there are no customers, then Home Depot will close the store. (Don’t get me started about the obverse of this when some then cry, “Big business is closing a store and ruining the neighborhood.”)

Perhaps the poster boy for bad business is still Enron from 2001. Surely that’s an example of a bad, bad business, right? Well, yes, but most importantly it was a major business tragedy. Just like any business, Enron was not a monolithic entity. It was a company of 22,000 people, only a small percentage of whom had the ethics of a toad. But the vast majority lost their income and their means to build their lives and wellbeing. (Fundamental #2) What’s more, at Arthur Andersen, Enron’s accounting and consulting firm, there was only a handful of incompetent people among the 7,000 who lost their jobs right away in the backlash.

Does Big Business do bad things? Sure, some of them do. So do small businesses. So do individuals. Through big leverage and big resources big businesses can have a big bad effect just as they have a large good effect. But let’s advance the conversation about “big bad business” to focus on which businesses are screwing up and which businesses are doing well. Let’s treat them individually. Heck, let’s treat them as if they were people.