In the US Domino’s Pizza has come under a lot of flak for their new marketing strategy.

For admitting that their product sucks, that the pizza base tastes like cardboard and saying sorry and then as a response to what their customers said developing and launching a new recipe. Crazy stuff Dominos, say the critics, you are alienating your loyal customers who presumably love cardboard and you are damaging your brand.

You can read the criticism on eConsultancy and Advertising Age by clicking on the links. While you are there read the comments. and when I tweeted the article today almost all the responses were the same, surprisingly disagreeing with the criticism.

Traditionally you would have either defended the product and shored up the brand or launched the new recipe with a “you always loved the old pizza but we have made it better”type of line.

But actually in today’s market that’s a very risky strategy.

• Domino’s customers all know the Pizza sucks, they buy it for convenient fast delivery.
• Their friends all know it too.
• They are connected to their friends.
• If you lie they will tell their friends that you are a liar.

So this is what domino’s did:

Now’s time for another story. In the late 80′s I was Client Services and Strategy Director for one of the hottest agencies in South Africa. One of clients was the biggest wine and spirits distributor. They had a dog of a wine brand, it had been promoted on the basis of its heritage – it was named after the birthplace of man who had opened a refreshment station at what is now Cape Town for ships bound from Europe to the East Indies in the spice trade.

Only one of the products was doing anything, a sweet wine loved by drunks in the Eastern Cape.

The heritage positioning was so thin that I suggested that we should throw it out and call it what it was “a good everyday drinking wine” the kind of stuff you would drink with your friends, people whom you had no need to impress.

Much to the horror of the Brand Manager but with the support of the senior management, who had decided to give the brand one last shot. So we told the truth about the brand and implemented that positioning, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and saved the brand.

The foundation of good marketing is not just great advertising its great product and great experiences. What’s the point of trying to tell your customers stuff they already know is bull. Why not show them a little respect, show them that you care, maybe they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe this campaign will get customers to have a fresh look.

Well done Domino’s – Telling the truth may just be the Killer Strategy.

Photo by cafemama on Flickr

The notion that there is a divide between digital marketing and traditional marketing based on whether the technology used is analogue or digital is really a little ridiculous.

This thought was all sparked by a conversation I had with a prominent industry person yesterday. We were talking about the state of digital and traditional marketing in South Africa. During that entire conversation I felt that we were on different planets, as though our point of departure was entirely different. I concluded that I must be  communicating badly and when I thought about it I realized a reason.

The marketing, adverting and for that matter digital industry often think of digital as a medium. That your job is to have a smart idea that you push onto the customer and you use the media they use because then they will see it. This allows traditional ad agencies to think that because they have a digital or interactive section they are in the game. That digital is a channel. This is where the thinking is flawed.

Marketing needs to change because the way people find things out, how they learn, how they connect and so how ideas spread has changed. Its a fundamental behavioural change.

People are still people and brands are still brands, but neither behave the way they once did.

If you use new channels in the same way that you used old channels then the new channels wont work, they wont just work because they are digital You can rethink the way you use the traditional channels – so that they do work.

The divide is not between digital and traditional, or new media and old or anything like that. The divide is between those who cant understand the changing consumers and those who can. Its not a debate between media types its a debate about how ideas spread.

The traditional marketing industry is based on two key assumptions. Consumers are ignorant and believe what they are told. Without this advertising can’t work nearly, not nearly, as well. Yet we have seen internationally that both those assumptions have proven to be false. 2010 could well be the year the penny drops, but probably not completely.

The assumption was once true: consumers were ignorant – they got their information from the company, from salesmen from advertising. Customers also used to believe what they were told; they trusted advertising – business controlled the brand message.

Not only does research around the world show that trust in advertising has declined but we also know that through the Internet and by their own connections, customers have access to an unbelievable mountain of information, opinions and comments. Just these facts have changed marketing forever. It’s with this backdrop that I make my predictions for 2010.

1. Someone will notice that, in spite of conventional wisdom, South Africans are connected. I mean, more than 30% of us access social sites on our cellphones alone on a daily basis. Everyone has a phone, even at the lower levels of society, with the majority capable of connecting to the Internet. But they won’t know how to use this information.

2. Marketers will be the first to cotton on. They will be influenced by their international contacts and will finally realise that the excuses of “but the majority of South Africans don’t use the Internet” and that we just don’t have the bandwidth are exactly that: excuses. With the new undersea cables coming into South Africa and Africa, bandwidth as a problem will soon be a thing of the past.

3. Local advertising agencies will be leaning back, secure in their misunderstandings but becoming slowly unsettled, as they listen to their international colleagues talking about the international media bloodbath and the need to rush to digital. They will see their international associates buy digital agencies – or even start a division of their own. BUT they won’t be the core of the business.

4. Agencies will still see digital and online as a media channel and start integrating into them more and more, not realising that the key characteristic of the Internet is that it’s a social creation. It’s about people connecting, not about the technology, or even the sites themselves.

5. Internationally, the lead will be taken by thought leaders – who realise that social media is not separate from the individual’s total life experience – making sure that digital eventually becomes the centre of the brand connection, not an adjunct.

6. From a technology point of view, manufacturers will be accelerating their efforts to make sure that connection to the Internet is ubiquitous and cheap. At the high end, Apple’s iPhone is already carrying more web data than any other mobile device; but there are netbooks, tablets, the Android phone and the soon-to-be announced Apple iSlate all making sure that, more and more, the web experience is accessible and separate from the technology.

7. The way people are finding stuff on the Internet is changing; this may start having an effect on traditional digital marketing. The filter that most users will place on getting the data they want will be their friends. SEO optimisation techniques will be under huge pressure from new search algorithms and as “friend” filters and real-time search guide web users.

8. There will be a lot of flapping in media circles as traditional media morphs. The resistance movement led by the News Corp relics will continue to resist and will become increasingly irrelevant. Media entrepreneurs led by the former journalist will reinvent the way the news is spread and the financial models related to that.

9. With every major change in society, new players will emerge, new approaches will take form and the cards in the pack will be reshuffled. I believe that we will see the first major signs of that in South Africa in 2010.

Marketing will change because consumers have changed. Consumers are no longer ignorant, whether they are 25 or 52 and living in Diepsloot or Dainfern; they have unprecedented access to information, they are buying online and are part of massive electronic networks.

Maybe the penny will drop, maybe it won’t. Then next year’s predictions will be to guess how big the splash will be as the dinosaurs fall into the marketing tar pit and their new competitors, more nimble, like mammals, create a new marketing ecosystem.

This post first appeared in Bizcommunity trends report.

Picture by The invizible on flickr

Related articles by Zemanta

• IOL Technology – SA Internet users increasing – study (ioltechnology.co.za)

Its a question worth asking and the subject of my chat on the Internet economy on Friday, January 15, 2010.

Brand stewardship/ custodianship has traditionally been a space that has been claimed by the advertising agency, althjough we are seldom in a conversation in digital circles that we don’t hear the view that the “agencies just don’t get it”  so if they dont who does. Are the digital agencies ready to lead the brand?

My fellow “The Beancast” panel member Ana Adejelic wrote about this in Advertising Age and was ridiculed by both agency and digital groups. In her view digital are in exploratory mode and ad agencies focused on exploiting a tried and tested approach, in essence this means digital will shoot the lights out but generally cant be trusted with the whole brand, whereas the ad agency are so locked replicating a “safe” formula that they have forgotten whats good for the brand.

Traditional agencies and marketers are stuck in a marketing model which is hopelessly out of date, it is based on the idea that homogeneous groups of consumers exist which are called target markets, and that loyalty can be built in these groups by repeatedly interrupting them with brand messages until they listen and when they do they will believe what they see and read.

Digital agencies are often built around the concept of search engine marketing and the techniques of SEO. They drive the “direct marketing” concepts of measurability and conversions, turning interaction into sales.

Is either of them right?

The Internet has been alive for years with the view that Advertising is dead, and more and more we are hearing the view that SEO is dead. In the words of Mark Twain in both cases “The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated” although in both these cases there is a whole lot of truth tied up in those reports.

Lets propose a different set of views:

• The Internet is essentially a social creation.
• The Internet is not another marketing medium as little as a discussion around the braai (BBQ) is a marketing medium.
• The internet is not only about analytics and conversions – about OBSERVATION, it needs also to about a UNDERSTANDING of how people behave.
• The real strength of the Internet is that it connects people.
• Brands are created by the experience that customers have.
• Because of the network of connections ideas (good and bad) can spread faster than ever was possible before.
• There is too much information around and customers have too little time.
• People don’t believe advertising, they are starting to not even search in the way they did. They ask their friends. (Real time search)
• If it’s important,information will find me.
• The power in the transaction has shifted, brands are no longer the only source of information.

These thoughts fundamentally change the way we think about brands, branding and marketing.

New marketing is essentially understanding that the game has changed, that the connection created by the internet, however it is accessed, by computer or mobile phone has fundamentally changed the way that society operates in a way that will never be rolled back. Because brands no longer have control of the information that customers can access. Brands will be built in new and different ways. They will use all the traditional tools but in a totally different way. Brands will be built by experiences and interactions.

Modern marketing was only invented in the 60s to understand the use of the most important communications tools of the era. The character of the new tools are fundamentally different. Although paradoxically when we read the early ad men it seems they got it.

Marketing has always been about making stuff and creating experiences that people want, making it available to them and getting them to talk about it. Branding in the final analysis is what people believe about stuff, what they talk about.

Ad agencies don’t get it and will never get it because the agency model and the way they work does not fit the social interaction model; agencies were invented to solve a different problem and to use one way communications channels. The new boys, digital agencies will battle as the Internet becomes more and more a way to connect ideas and people and less like a catalogue, a searchable database and so the role of the search engine changes dramatically.

Brands are built around storytelling, there is a legend that surrounds every brand, that story was being told by brands about themselves, now the story is being told by customers, about their experiences. Customers who have the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, now have the capacity to share and collaborate on a scale never before thought possible, to share and spread ideas and stories around the world almost instantaneously.

Although the fundamentals of marketing have not changed, because customers have the approach also needs to. Brands are still important and marketing now becomes more than just a box on the organogram, it becomes the entire business as seen from the point of view of the customer who don’t care where they interact with the brand as its all part of the same experience, an experience they tell their friends about.

The story that becomes the brand.

I see a totally new type of agency, one that understands the new customer that will guide its clients through the process of building the customers total experience and of engagement. An agency that has a fundamental understanding of how people buy, of all the communications channels and how to use them not to attempt to overpower customers into brand loyalty but assist them to spread the idea. The idea that is the brand.

This is part of the vision behind PiKE | The New Marketing Agency

Listen to what we spoke about Podcast Link Here

Museo Rufino Tamayo - Mexico

The view that you can build brands with advertising has always been a myth. This a point that I made in an article published in 2005 reviewed by @karllong here the original has moved to here. The producer of  MEDIA@SAfm had dug this out and invited Brett Morris group creative director at DraftFCB and I to discussed it on this sundays show.

It was surprise when I saw the article lying on the host Ashraf Garda’s desk but I thought that it was really cool, firstly to see how consistent I have been in my views of how marketing works, and although I am into social media and stuff now its still the same philosophy, its just that the tools have become more powerful.

The point is that brands were always built by the experience customers have of the brand, advertising can create expectations but its the real experience that determines the brand. What changes now is the speed at which people can share experiences through their connections and  social networks on the internet and on mobile phones. So the expereinces that they share are even more likely to be real than what the advertiser tells them they should be.

Not that there isn’t a role for Advertising in the future – there is but its a different one.

This is the space in which I launch the new PiKE | The integrated new marketing agency in January.

Numbers by stewf on flickr

Why are marketing people so obsessed by numbers and measurability? Especially with large numbers which are often assumed to be better than small ones. This obsession clouds judgment and so we seldom stop to think much about those numbers, what they stand for and even to understand what a good number looks like, and we often measure what we can measure rather than what is meaningful to measure.

In broadcast media planning we look at Gross Rating Points (GRP) and opportunities to see and audience numbers, in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) we want to drive  people to our website, and we are looking for unique visitors and conversion rates, on twitter we are looking for followers – the more the merrier.

But do these particular numbers have any real relevance? I understand the need for a large audience if you are flighting a TV ad, if say only 20% of people notice the ad its better that its 20% of the largest possible number. The same goes for SEM driving as many unique visitors as possible to the site, really for the same reason.

But this assumes that the purchase process is a linear one (steo by step from awareness to sale) which increasingly its not (The new customer Journey : The OPEN Brand), it also assumes that the objective, the end of the purchase journey is THIS sale instead of this and all possible future and related sales.

Furthermore If the major task of marketing is idea diffusion then do the numbers matter?

I don’t think they do, I would rather have 100 of the right people engaging with me, on my site or wherever, my customers about whom I am passionate about or people who could be passionate about my product and influential enough to spread the word, than 100 000 randoms. In this case 100 is a far better number than 100 000.

The numbers that would make sense would measure the quality of our engagement and the quality of the interaction.

I do a night class on Digital Strategy and we did a discussion last evening on Social Media. It struck me how many of the solutions proposed were so traditional, ok granted I have only just introduced the topic of Social Media and many have been working in the agency world. I told the story to the class of a major FMCG company whose marketing director has said that they think social media is dangerous because people can talk about you. I find that such an “interesting” comment

I also picked up Jason Falls‘ post on social media explorer Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash last night and I think that he is right. There is such ingrained thinking in marketing and advertising circles that its really hard to change.

There is a tactical problem because social media fits into the agency business model with difficulty. There is also a significant philosophical issue and to quote Jason Falls “Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking. It can also be said that social media is a multiple-way communications method as brands can speak and listen, but also watch other consumers talk to each other.”

After my talk at the TEDx event last Friday a young strat planner intern from a  major agency came up to me and asked me how we were going to change peoples thinking. Wow its going to take time and maybe many just wont change because its just so different.

Maybe the change in thinking will come from people like those in my Digital Strategy class but also when brands and agencies realise that their customers are already participating in social media, even if they aren’t.

Photo Source: Flickr Author: Darwin Bell: License:

I was challenged regarding my last post on how marketing is changing about whether Twitter is a broadcast medium.  That my point regarding word of word to spread ideas was a nice but vaguely naive notion. The argument was that it Twitter is used in a one to many manner, I send out a tweet which all of my followers read  – that equals broadcast.

The answer I suppose in that simplistic context is that it can be used that way, in fact many of the tools being used to get followers (none of which I subsribe to) have been created to turn Twitter into a broadcast medium, but its inherent character is not that. Its character is a massive simultaneous conversation in which people listen, talk back and then talk to thier friends. In any conversation the person talking carries some status in the community and in twitter its no different. The words some people say are just carry more weight than others. These people have influence and this is derived from the nature of their relationship with others

Influence, not numbers, is the currency of the internet  and they are not related. Numbers on the other hand are the important factor of broadcast media which is aimed at getting eyeballs (opportunities to see) but the conversation stops there, the audience sees and may notice, but there is no way that it becomes a conversation, people cant answer back and people cant share.

For a medium like twitter its who sees and the influence they can have as they pass the message on. A massive difference in my mind.

As an example I very recently came across a tool called Topsy, its a twitter based search engine and it ranks its search results on the basis of the tweeters influence. To quote them, “Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.”

This is a cool idea and specifically cool because when I checked my status I was amazed to find that it ranks me as highly influential (a status reserved for the top 0,2% most influential of twitter users) and I have only just about 2000 followers. As with all of this I think that you can take yourself too seriously and I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does illustrate the point.

Walter's status on Topsy

My argument about the change in marketing is just this phenomena. The object of marketing has always been to spread an idea, the idea that the consumer should buy my product or service instead of someone else’s. The  best way in the past was to broadcast it over and over until the audience did, but as broadcast media loses effectiveness the best way in the future will be to produce something remarkable and get the former audience to talk to each other about it.

That’s why you need think of Twitter as anything but a broadcast medium.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960′s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.

If you were given the challenge of  attracting young South African high school people to consider a career in advertising when they leave school, what would you do?

I would probably consider that even squatter settlement kids are connected on mobile phones, more than 70% who have their own phones of which more than 80% are WAP enabled.

I would consider the fact that 29% of South Africans are accessing mobile user generated content (UGC) on a daily basis and the projections that the South African Mobile user generated content market will reach $476 million by year end 2013.

I would consider that mobile UGC services like MXit and The Grid have already become the perfect communication platform for many South Africans especially teenagers and young adults (13 – 25 years old) JBB Research Report July 2009

I would talk with them in an environment that they are comfortable in because they are there all the time. I would build a community in which they could share a passion to communicate, to write and to reach out to their world.

But would I actually do that?

No . . .  probably not. that doesn’t represent a career in advertising. Not now.

I would probably do a poster campaign.