It’s no secret - our economy is sick. Unemployment is on the rise, people are at risk of losing their homes, the stock market is down, and people are generally worried about their financial future.

As a result, people are scaling back on their spending -forcefully becoming more thrifty. Still, let’s be honest, we’re Americans. While we might cut back - even a lot - we won’t cut completely out; it’s the American way to be spendthrift-ish.

So for the next several months while the economy shakes things up, what should be your strategy -particularly during the busy, competitive holiday season? People are bound to spend less. So what how do you draw more of this smaller pool of dollars to your brand vs. the competition?

Fundamentally, there is a shift in the way people spend their money. Much more, people need to feel good about the money they’re spending. Value is huge. So if you can’t change your product, what can you change?

How about CUSTOMER SERVICE?

It slipped away when people would buy regardless of the experience, because spending wasn’t an issue. Today, though, a dollar needs to go farther. It isn’t just the pair of shoes a customer buys, but the experience she has doing it. Brands need to make their customers FEEL GOOD about the money they spend. Call it guilt management … with a smile.

Let me give a personal example:

I’ve had some major dental work done over the past 2 years. For anyone that’s been through this kind of ordeal, you know it’s painful and time consuming … but more than that, it’s EXPENSIVE. Bottom line, it’s natural to put these things off - and even more so in tough financial times.

And when it comes to dental work there are always options. Do you get the cheap filling or crown, or the pretty one? Do you pull the tooth, or repair it, etc.

Recently, I wrapped up my dental work - and I bought the pretty options/the more expensive options. Why? His SERVICE sold me. I adore my dentist and his entire staff, and they made me feel good about choosing the pricier options.

And to say that I haven’t cried in his chair would be a lie. Still, I love my dentist - now that’s sayin’ something. Everything about his business is better than any other dental experience I have had. They run the business like your personal experience makes or breaks them. They give frank and honest consultations, fair options, and they learn who you are and deliver based on your needs. I’m now loyal, and will “shop” with him for all my dental needs, period.

This is a huge lesson for businesses right now - online or offline. Actual service improvements will improve your bottom line. That’s a fundamental business change if you’re not already excelling in the area. But the other lesson here is this: Make people feel better about spending with you. What do they get buying from you that they don’t get at your competitor? Sounds simple. But if my experience has shown me anything, the simpiler the answer, the more likely it is to be right.

** Props to Dr. Wingfield **

I was perusing AdFreak as I often do mid-afternoon for my industry laugh, when I read the post “Viewers rise up against ‘Saved by Zero’ ads.”

I’m fairly certain I don’t even need to describe this ad, I think everyone knows it. My 10-year old son will even sigh when he hears it now.

What I learned from the AdFreak post is that there are actually several websites hosting rants about this ad (e.g. Consumerist, Esquire). One quote the post cited: “It makes me want to kill someone/never ever buy a Toyota.”

Now, you know you’ve done something wrong when something like this happens. 

I am NOT one to subscribe to “any publicity is good publicity.” I think you need to respect your audience and deliver a message that they actually want to hear - something they can connect with, that will move them to act. Maybe the idea of 0% financing is a good one - but delivery is everything.

Tell me how this ad moves somebody to act? (besides to rant on websites, or declare they’ll never buy a Toyota, or threaten suicide)

While perusing Seth Godin’s blog, I stumbled on a post that was brilliant in its simplicity. So I have to share it:

Do you have 16 Boxes?

“… Imagine that you have a 4 x 4 grid to fill with assets. If it’s a business, it might be location, reputation, staff, offerings that are in high demand and a sector that’s robust… if you’re doing it for yourself, it might include your resume, your network, your skill set, etc. When someone chooses you or your products, they’re considering everything you have to offer. Whether you’re looking for a job or trying to make a sale, there is rarely only one thing that makes the difference.”

“That’s why human nature is so enraging. When something is going wrong, when the economy is out of sync, we panic. We obsess about just one of the sixteen boxes and ignore the others. We talk ourselves into hysteria about how, “none of our customers have any money,” or, “in this bleak economy, we’ll never make a sale.” Instead of using the relative downtime to build up the other 15 boxes, we just sit in the corner, keening, worrying about that one box that’s out of whack.”

It’s common sense right? Sort of business strategy meets positive thinking?

Is this just wishful thinking? Maybe. Maybe not. Yes, eventually tough decisions have to made when $$ doesn’t come in. I get that. But, take a minute to consider what could be achieved if we put panic aside. Focus would shift from “money money money” to: building upon category expertise, focusing on new ideas, challenging conventional thinking, building culture ….

I’d venture to guess that the companies who chose this path will come out stronger in the end.

Read the rest of Seth’s blog here.

Like most people in marketing and communications, I’m captivated by the election season.  The time, money and STRATEGY thrown into creating an image for a presidential campaign is unparalleled by any other marketing and communications endeavor. 

My friend and colleague Shannon Delaney is totally immersed. Of the election season she says “THIS IS MY FOOTBALL.” I couldn’t agree more.  (Note: look for a guest editorial from Shannon in the upcoming issue of Direct Magazine; she discusses the good and bad about digital marketing in political campaigns.)

Like every other election, the candidates and their teams hungrily utilize every medium at their disposal to reach the masses.  But, in my opinion, the candidates in this election season have done an exceptional job of incorporating emerging marketing into their campaigns - LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and even mobile marketing. These are now heavily leveraged alongside other more commonplace digital mediums such as websites, blogs and email marketing. 

We all know how powerful social media can be in building reputation. As business and consumer marketers, we see this pretty much every day in campaigns created online for well known brands (and even lesser known brands – which is what makes this medium so powerful).  Political marketers understand that these same tactics can be used very successfully to build community, encourage conversation and build relationships that support their campaigns.  Both pro and anti candidate messages are fueling an election season like we’ve never seen before.

I could blog for pages about the marketing and PR strategies used to build the images of these candidates, and to deliver and shape their messages.  Instead, I’ll just say – take the time to make this election season your football.  You just might take away a few tricks to use in your own marketing and communications plans.

As the election heats up … check out these blogs for some political and marketing commentary:

• Campaign Freak: AdWeek’s political blog. 
• Campaign Trail: AdAge’s political blog.
• YouTube’s Political Vlog & their blog CitizenTube
• Campaign Junkie: by Slate.
• The Caucus: The New York Time’s political blog.
• Political Browser: The Washington Post’s blog.

I bought last month’s Atlantic magazine while I was wasting some time in the airport a few weeks ago. The cover caught my attention: Is Google Making us Stoopid?

I read through the article and couldn’t help sympathizing with the author, Nicholas Carr, who is experiencing weaker and weaker concentration and finding that he can’t read more than 3 paragraphs of anything anymore without being overwhelmingly distracted, wanting to jump to the next thing. Of course, he contends, this epidemic of distraction (can anyone say Attention-Deficit Syndrome?) plaguing our modern world is partly due to the distraction-friendly behavior that the Web induces. “Hyper”-linking, after all, is the very nature of the web.

As of now, all of this is just anecdotal. No scientific studies are confirming our decrease in intellect. Friends are asking each other “Hey is it harder for you to stay focused on single piece of writing for any length of time.” Friends are sharing their experiences.

Carr says,

“Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. ‘I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,’ he wrote. ‘What happened?’ He speculates on the answer: ‘What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?’”

It’s not new to understand the relationship between human thought/behavior and technology. The two are linked. The way that humans processed information prior to the printing press was very different than after the widespread dissemination of the printed word.

Today, I caught myself in the act of surfing the web. Mid-stream I spontaneously thought, “This would be a great example of our HYPER-linking behavior.” What does it look like? Here’s only about 15 minutes of my day:

• Scanning nytimes.com
• Article entitled “Advertising: Woman to Woman, Online” catches my eye
• Intrigued by the title and the relevance to my work in online marketing, I read the first 3 paragraphs of the article. The journalist begins by describing Dooce, a blog created by Heather Armstrong, who eventually could quit her day job because marketers began paying her to advertise there.
• Curious, I stop reading the nytimes article and skip over to Dooce.com
• Check out Daily Photo, Daily Chuck, and the FAQs
• Read the HA-larious “About this Site” section (which I read in full, mind you)
• Then look at a section called Mastheads, which are banner-esque monthly musings of language and design by Armstrong.
• This led me to google “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, which happens to be Armstrong’s August masthead. (And the design for which looks uncannily like the new United Airlines television campaign. If you haven’t seen it, you must not be watching the Olympics.)
• In googling “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, I see in the results an article called, “Our Oceans are Turning into Plastic…are we”
• After reading about 4-5 paragraphs, when I couldn’t find the answer to the title question, I scanned through the article. There was a nice graph that helped me a bit and big caption that read, “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contribuing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world.”
• Becoming disheartened with this topic, I used the back button (twice) to get back to the funny and irreverent Dooce.com

At this point, I stop dead in my tracks. Nicholas Carr was correct. We don’t read anything longer than a few lines anymore. Are you still reading this blog???? Congratulations.

In the Atlantic magazine article Richard Foreman, a modern playwright who is documenting his own cognitive and intellectual changes as information becomes ubiquitous, says “[As we are drained of our] inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Which leads me to the last click (the Back button) in my 15 minutes of surfing the web, “Pull a chair up with the hyrup”, Amstrong’s latest blog post on Dooce.com, which describes how she can’t serve her daughter pancakes because she doesn’t know how to make them. This blog post includes a funny youtube video about making pancakes, which I spent a good 3 minutes watching.

I think I’m stoopider than I was 15 minutes ago.

In 2006 Conan O’Brien was on Charlie Rose and made a comment to the effect of being in “The Golden Age of TV”.  I’ve heard several people in the last few years mention this Golden Age of Television – the idea that  with high competition from a multitude of cable/satellite channels and saturation of the internet, networks are being forced to break out of the mold.  It makes sense, right?

I watch a lot of television, and I think we are in yet another Golden Age of Television*.  However, this might be the last Golden Age of Television on the actual television. And by that I mean the next wave of great episodic, small screen, short format, motion pictures (my new definition of TV Shows**) will be all digital and delivered in a variety of avenues, not just on your TV set.

The networks (finally) realize this, so they’re pushing out the best content in years to keep you tuned in, but I think this latest Golden Age of Television is helping accelerate the migration.  The shows are so good and so discussed – both online and off – that normal viewers are changing their behavior to consume them.  Now, admittedly, I’m not a normal viewer, but I do use several of the outlets that are becoming more commonplace.  I have Tivo, ReplayTV, and Apple TV.  I also “Slingbox” from a DirectTV/DVR and watch YouTube on my iPhone (or Wii ) when I’m bored.  But most recent - and now my most popular choice - is watching shows directly from network websites.

This last outlet is the one I want to discuss in more detail, because I believe it’s the future, and possibly the only place networks will be able to run when TV as we know it goes away.  Now, I mentioned watching shows online as being a recent thing, but it isn’t really for me or anyone else, I just mean that it’s finally a viable option.  Basically, all the other things I mentioned, from Tivo to Apple TV, are crutches, hybrids, mere toys that are helping me along until the inter-web catches up.  It’s close now with the quality of video players that are showing up on network sites and the increase in bandwidth to homes across the land.  At this point we’re only lacking a way to easily put these sites up on our current TVs; my Apple TV*** and Wii get me close but not quite there (and that’s a whole article in itself).

So why are network (and other online) video players the future?  It’s the ability to control content and display sophisticated advertising, as well as other benefits like tracking, ease-of-use, social networking, and instant gratification which the web provides.  On-demand content through cable/satellite providers come close, but lack some of these aspects.  And by the time they catch up, the game will have changed again.

Back to networks. Through my online video player, not only can I serve up specifc episodes instantly, I can incorporate ranking and recommendations from the community, promote other content properties that I own, and pull in complentary content (games, wikis,etc…) that reinforce the brand.

Example: I can watch Burn Notice on USA and sit through all the commercials (12 - 16 minutes worth), I could watch it on AppleTV for $1.99 through iTunes, or I could watch it on usanetwork.com (1 - 3 minutes of commercials, never more than 30 seconds per break).  Even if I Tivo’d Burn Notice (which I do on occasion) assuming I remembered or had it scheduled, I still have to fast forward through 8 or so commercial breaks, which typically equates to more time fast forwarding than the 3 minutes online.  When I do end up watching on USA’s site, I’m served up ads that I usually don’t mind watching because they’re more targeted.  I also get links to a Burn Notice game, Burn Notice character profiles, and I get to see a funny clip for Monk (which I might start watching now).

I’ll touch more on this in the days to come; I’d really like to look at what networks are doing right and doing wrong in the way they broadcast their content on the web.  For now, I would love any comments you have, especially video players and sites you’ve visited.  If nothing else, go watch something: NBC, USA, TBS, ABC.

*All you TV historians will probably classify this as the “Third: Golden Age of Television”.
**Give me some slack, it’s a work in progress. I probably need to take out “small screen” once my new contacts make it irrelevant.
*** If I could bring myself to hack my Apple TV I think I would have the technology part of this equation solved, but I don’t want to risk it and it’s not easy for the average user.

I just read a post on The Influencial Marketing Blog called “The 3 Philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing.” The writer had attended WOMM-U 2008, an event dedicated to the fast-growing branch of marketing, and picked up on some common themes about how WOM was defined. These included:

1. WOM is a Channel
2. WOM is an Outcome
3. WOM is Viral / Buzz

He says “WOM as a channel” would be an excellent way to to describe WOM to traditional marketers who are accustomed to media channels, while”WOM as an outcome” suggests that ultimately WOM is an outcome to all forms of marketing. So in some ways, everything we do stimulates WOM.

The final idea is probably the most common description. “WOM is Viral” suggests that the ultimate purpose of WOM is for messages to go viral. The writer agrues that while this is perhaps the most popular thought, it isn’t necessarily true. He says that viral tends to describe one person passing something to another person, regardless of quality, while in its purest form, WOM is intended to create positive buzz.

So how do you define WOM?

As I was eating my spaghetti leftovers yesterday for lunch at my desk (sad, I know), I came across news that Arby’s is merging with Wendy’s.

Suddenly a vision came to me and I thought I’d begin the process of voicing what awesome combinations of lunch could come forth from such a melding of quick service restaurant chains  (this would make Arbys + Wendy’s into #3 behind the other two - you know who they are).

Combo #1 - Beef ‘n Cheddar + Vanilla Frosty

And for the marketing spin, how’s this for a new tagline:  “I’m thinking this is WAAAAY better than McD and BK”  (it’s awful, I know, but it’s all I could conjure up on leftover lunch).

Happy Lunch Hour to all - would love to hear other visions of combos.

I don’t often watch South Park, but when a friend sent me this clip I had to share it with everyone. As I watched, it dawned on me how much we rely on the internet these days, and nothing can illustrate it better than this clip.

Click on the picture above, or visit this link to view the clip.

Would you be able to function on a day-to-day basis with no internet?

Bree posted a link to Starbucks’ online coffee promotion - free brew-at-home coffee samples with the completion of a little flavor preference quiz.

While I definitely appreciated the nifty interactive interface for this promotion (Bree called it brilliant - I mean, who doesn’t want free coffee?), it’s actually a symptom of a much larger problem at Starbucks.

A BusinessWeek article published yesterday stated “Starbucks (SBUX) stock dropped 42.8% in 2007 and is down 14.7% since the start of 2008.” That’s cause for concern.

A result, many consumers are beginning to witness a massive re-branding exercise, aimed at improving Starbucks’ bottom line. This exercise began as far back as January when Starbucks re-elected company founder Howard Schulz as CEO. Immediately, Howard whipped up a “Transformation Agenda,” communicated to the public on their website as numbered announcements.

Here’s What’s Up.

Over a period of several years, Starbucks grew to become an Arcadia to coffee lovers. But, over the past couple of years, this paradise has begun to slip away from them.

Even though the company still maintains a loyal following (I know at least one person who goes their 2x per day every day), less loyal people are flocking to cheaper vendors who are now offering “premium” blends, such as McDonalds and Dunkin’ Donuts. A recent article even pointed out that McDonalds plans to launch espressos and mochas nationwide this year.

How Does Starbucks Plan to Regain Their Position?

Watching this Transformation Agenda come to fruition has been fascinating to watch. It’s a truly massive business, sales, and marketing initiative from top to bottom. The Agenda outlines the following courses of action:

• Slow the pace of U.S. store openings and accelerate internationally
• Discontinue warmed breakfast sandwiches at our North American stores (the smell interferes with the aroma of their coffee … Um, k.)
• Going forward, they will not report same store sales comps
• Reinvent partner training
• Reinstating regularly scheduled open forums in the field
• Bring back the Leadership Conference

Through the numbered announcements and other research, I was also able to identify the following.

• Adding Wi-Fi to all US stores (rolling out this service market-by-market to more than 7,000 Starbucks stores)
• In-store training for their more than more than 135,000 store partners in the US. (which included closing stores during this training)
• A reorganization that will eliminate 600 positions (mostly non-retail support folks)
• Introduction of the Park Place blend (the everyday Joe’s blend - smoother than most Starbucks blends that’s receiving very mixed reviews)

Ask the Customer

Throughout nearly every Agenda announcement written by Howard he stresses the importance to have a “laser focus” on the customer. This left me saying “but, are you talking to them yet??” Well, today I just discovered that the company is now soliciting feedback from customers through a CRM portal called “My Starbucks Idea.”

I’m not sure when it launched, but it is a pretty serious endeavor. Interestingly, the portal is powered by Salesforce.com - a sign of their commitment for this venture to be truly built around the customer relationship. Many ideas are very creative. Others are just painfully obvious - like frequent buyer cards. I suppose it never dawned on me, but Starbucks has never offered a buy 9 get one free card before!

Now, of course, what’s most important is what they do with this feedback. If they’re really “laser focused” on the customer, then the most important changes they make will stem from a consensus of pain points and ideas generated from My Starbucks Idea, in addition to the important business and organizational changes.

Going Back to Their Roots.

Another decision was made to - if only temporarily - bring back the store’s original logo, used on the coffee cup and sleeves.

It’s a strange double-finned mermaid thing (I should probably have known what this was, but I’m not up on my maritime mythical lore. Here’s what it is, if you’re curious. Funny, but I guess even the “new” logo is also this double-finned creature, you just see mostly her face). Anyway …. it’s not really the logo that matters. It’s symbolic of their commitment to bring Starbucks back to its roots - before they tried to be all things to all people. CDs, sandwiches, a shop on every corner…

What’s probably most promising is that this is clearly not a slapdash program. Howard and the rest of Starbucks’ leadership are executing on careful planning, and communicating to shareholders, the public, and their partners in a very systematic fashion.

What Do You Think?

So what does everyone out there think? What would you tell Tomer (our Director of Development) who has stock in Starbucks? Hang in there, or cash it in?