FEB. 2010 STRATEGIC MARKETING UPDATE IS READY

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HCLLC'S strategic marketing update for February is now available. In this issue we look at:

• Tiger Woods' brand value - Fizzle or Sizzle again?
• Mike's latest podcast: "Being A Great Marketing Leader"
  
• Latest trends in media
• New white paper: "How Complicated Marketing Destroys Profits...And What You Can Do About It"
• and more...

CLICK HERE TO READ

Enjoy. 

Marketing and PR flacks have it wrong about Haiti and Royal Caribbean

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Advertising Age today published an article quoting high ranking  executives at major PR firms decrying Royal Caribbean's decision  not to suspend its cruise ship stops at the port of Labadee in Haiti. Labadee is apparently about 60 miles from the horrific devastation at Port-Au-Prince. CLICK HERE for article.

The PR execs were quoted as saying: "this strikes a nerve with people and the brand will take a hit," and "this is a massive debacle and shows absolutely horrible judgment".

The New York Post published an article on same titled "Ship Of Ghouls".

Nonsense. Reading another 15 seconds into the story shows that Royal Caribbean is handling the situation appropriately.

• They took very careful consideration about whether to continue the stops.
  
• They decided that withdrawing the positive economic impacts of tourism from Haiti would only make a bad situation worse.
  
• They're donating $1,000,000 to the rescue and cleanup efforts
• They're donating 100% of net revenue from RC cruise ship stops in Haiti to the relief effort.
• They're using their ships to ferry relief supplies.

We posted this comment in response to all the PR poobah hand-wringing:

"I agree, non-story. However this is a very good example of why traditional PR is in a decline. A lot of old school PR folk way overestimate the value of their personal views and apparently underestimate the ability of people to think for themselves. The new PR calls for a Joe Friday approach: "just the facts ma'am"...plus a heckuva lot of knowledge about how the internet has antiquated the usefulness of PR escalation for the sake of taking beleaguered clients for a ride."

Good job, Royal Caribbean.

Mike Harris's comments published in McKinsey Quarterly

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20 JANUARY 2010

"As a business school graduate, business owner, and guest lecturer at The Rady School of Business at UCSD, I applaud efforts to train business students in policy. It’s clear to me that business people, including myself, have let the country down by allowing this current bunch of politicians practically free reign in shaping ‘policy’ that has the potential for damaging our country irreparably. Hopefully this next generation of both politicians and business men and women can effectively be trained to reach across the aisle far better than their predecessors."

CLICK HERE to see published comments. This was in reponse to an interview with the current dean of The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. The dean suggests that teaching policy to MBA students would help business people understand government better.

Winning The Marketing Game in 2010

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Marketing teams have been decimated in the past two years while the shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing has reached a stage where few individuals can keep up. Startups are buried and have very limited marketing funds. Small companies ($10-250 million annual revenues) have a tough time keeping a current website updated and compelling. Mid-sized companies ($250 million to $1 billion) have money for marketing but are faced with so many options that decision errors are common.

We've developed the following insights from years of managing, and being, marketing managers and executives. We believe these are the critical skills and attitudes needed for 2010 and beyond:

1. Knowledge of web marketing. The #1 criterion for 2010. By now all of your marketing employees and contractors must know web marketing at the detailed level. It is the single most important qualification regardless of age, experience and company rank. It is the most important because, for most companies, it is the greatest determinant of competitiveness or will be soon.  Click here to download web marketing interview questions.
2.  Affinity for sales. There's no more time or resources for tolerating unnecessary friction between marketers and the sales team. Both groups must combine their common knowledge to choose the right markets, compelling products, advertising and sales strategy. Encourage both teams to abandon preconceived notions of each others' boundaries and reward those who show a proclivity for getting cooperative results from the other side. This goes both ways. Check out this excellent article: Top 5 Lies Marketing Tells Sales.
3. Training. For marketers to be at the top of their game they must embrace continuing education. If your people are behind, and you can afford it, send them to relevant marketing seminars and/or pay for courses. If you can't prioritize the money for the more extensive programs ask them to do a self-assessment of where they need to improve. Let them identify online resources or local college courses that will be helpful...and pay for those. Just Google "marketing training courses" and you'll find tons from which to choose . Google also offers great internet marketing training at no cost.
4. Planning. It is critical to your company's profitability that your marketers plan, plan, plan where they're going to invest their time and your resources. The tendency today is for companies to overwhelm marketers with spontaneous requests to pursue the latest and greatest marketing technique. This is guaranteed to achieve the worst results. Instead, work with your marketers to make sure they have a cohesive marketing plan with a concrete budget. Make sure all your anticipated needs are in this plan and can realistically happen with resources allocated. If your team doesn't know where to start try http://paloaltosoftware.com/. They have great, inexpensive planning software.
5. Forecasting. There are lots of ways to improve forecasting skills. Marketers in 2010 must be adept at forecasting campaign results, budgets, downstream impacts of marketing decisions and sales by region, brand, product category and time period. If you make this a requirement your marketing team will be that much more respected by both Sales and Finance because your marketers will be speaking to them on their terms. Some examples of forecasting tools include: http://www.alightplanning.com/, http://www.prophix.com/, http://www.statisticalforecasting.com/, http://centage.com/index.htm and http://www.planguru.com/index.html.

What the heck is Web 3.0 and why should I care?

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The year 2010 will be the coming of age for Web 3.0. A quick look at the chart below will show you the rapid evolution of the world wide web from 'brochure-ware' to 'intelligence-ware'.

One of the best ways to explain this evolution in easy-to-understand language is using a scenario. Suppose in each of the years 1996, 2006 and 2010 you decided to purchase a new Ferrari. Here's how the web would help in each instance:

1. In Web 1.0, pre-Google days, you would pretty much have to know the URLs that could show you what you need to know. Only the most advanced dealers would have a web presence and the information you gleaned would be wildly skewed toward their brands and models. Car And Driver wasn't online in 1996 and there were no blogs.

2. In Web 2.0 you would search "Ferrari" and you'd come up with all dealers, whether they're in Buffalo or Tokyo. You'd also find user reviews, auto expert opinions, blogs, You Tube videos, information on government rebates and stimulus packages for Ferrari purchasers, new car loans and just a huge hodgepodge of information...some of it meaningful to your search, some of it not.

3. In Web 3.0 you text a friend from your mobile phone with a message like "I'm thinking about a Ferrari...know anybody who has one?" Search engines would pick up on your text and deliver to you, with your permission, a list of local Ferrari dealers and contact info, testimonials from owners in your area and banks who specialized in high-end car loans.

In other words, Web 3.0 adds intelligence to your text, search or email to anticipate your next thoughts and next steps. It will then attempt to guide you to relevant, highly targeted information in case you decide to move on to next steps.The various shops, banks and other commercial enterprises will be presented according to the web's assessment of how relative their messaging is to your particular situation and, or course, how much they spend with the search engines. The tricky part in all this is that it must be permission based marketing. Getting a bunch of annoying pop-ups while you're texting, Facebook-ing or Twitter-ing will likely turn you away from those vendors, won't it?

Many, many companies are barely investing in the most basic target marketing and lead generation tools offered by Web 2.0. Marketing departments, or what's left of them, at mid-size and larger companies, are struggling just to learn about using social media for marketing. Most marketing people working for companies are stretched way too thin to even think about the implications of Web 3.0 and are setting their companies up to get blindsided by that one competitor who gets it and puts in the time and effort to wield it effectively.

The big difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, that we can see, is that in Web 2.0 the user must exert effort to customize the information needed for his/her particular purchase criteria. In Web 3.0 the information is automatically customized for the user's purchase criteria because the user has been feeding the web personal information, including shopping habits, for years.

And that has HUGE implications for marketing and sales.

The following chart is courtesy of Digital Inspiration.

Marketing in 2010

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• Should I care about Web 3.0? CLICK HERE
• Top 10 reasons to ignore Web 3.0 CLICK HERE
• Marketing teams in 2010 CLICK HERE
• Advertising in 2010 CLICK HERE
• Public relations in 2010 CLICK HERE

Costs plummet for public relations

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Next to personal sales calls, PR is the most powerful marketing tool out there. However the cost of even average PR has been disproportionate to the marketing benefit for years.

2) the emergence of effective and affordable tools like Vocus and PR Web

3) the ability to use PR as a lead gen tool by combining it with e-mail and social media...something most PR folks aren't yet using effectively

4) the commoditizing of creativity...thanks to the web, there are now excellent alternatives to hiring expensive PR and ad agencies to manufacture corporate creativity.

We're a marketing consulting firm and have recently started offering PR services for a ridiculously low price, using Vocus and free lancers to get the job done. Clients love it.

Goodbye Vista, hello Mac

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I finally threw in the towel on Microsoft Windows.

After 12 months of pain and frustration with Vista, I drove down to my local Apple store and purchased an iMac. At the end I couldn't get a single thing to work with Vista. My Blackberry wouldn't sync, my HP all-in-one wouldn't scan or fax, my Outlook kept crashing and the list goes on. Mine's a good case study on how to lose a customer, I suppose.

Had I taken the time to understand Macs earlier I would have owned one long before this. My daughter has grown up on Macs but I figured since the business world runs on Windows, for the most part, that I'd stick with that. Dumb.

The value of my time that I wasted trying to get Vista to do what it said it would do was easily in the thousands of dollars. The heretofore pricey Macs didn't seem so pricey when I looked at it through that filter.

Ever had a product that made you eager to use it? Having the hardware and software come from the same manufacturer is brilliant product strategy. The synergies are a thing of beauty.

My favorite experience, so far, has had nothing to do with my occupation. I was noodling around in the applications section and saw one called Front Row so I clicked on it. Holy cow! I  could scroll through brief summaries of current flicks and click on the trailer if one looked interesting. Wireless download time was superb and I felt like I was at the theater. I spent an hour just looking at trailers! The great part was that I didn't have to go to some website and wade through a morass of stuff in which I had no interest, banner ads and annoying pop-ups from Netflix. The iMac apparently takes care of updating Front Row and I get exactly what I want with a single click. I bet I could set it up on voice command and just say "Front Row" to get into the app.

Looking forward to seeing what else this new machine will do.

Yahoo and Bing play strategy catch up

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A classic case study in strategy is unfolding right before our eyes.

Google just reached its 11th birthday (can you believe it!). Google owns 65% of the search market. Its two closest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, own 17% and 9% respectively (the combination has been unoffically dubbed Microhoo). Why is Google such a formidable competitor?

Consider the competitors' current strategies.

Google continues to prove that it is, by far, the better strategic competitor by launching new initiatives both horizontally and verically. First it launched a new browser product, Google Chrome, to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox (a vertical strategy). Chrome offers a sleek, minimalist interface and a more user friendly approach to search. Then Google launched  Google Android, a new mobile operating system that competes with platforms from Microsoft Windows and Apple (a horizontal strategy).

Microhoo, on the other hand, is choosing to compete only vertically by going after existing share in a market that's hugely dominated by Google...a strategy with huge marketing costs but one that doesn't depend on technology excellence (Vista driven decision?) Unfortunately, Microhoo's strategy is one that works much better in a fragmented market versus a consolidated market like search.

Time will tell. After spending an excruciating year with Vista (and switching to Mac) I know which horse I'll place my bets...and investment dollars...on.

Local TV commercial from Cullman, AL

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Classic example of target marketing. Most everyone would say this is horrific marketing but, if we stop to think about it, it's:

• well targeted
• positions the company well
• explains the value compellingly
• encourages next steps

Local TV commercial from Cullman, AL. 

I wonder how he did that without an MBA?