All Hail Fragmentation

As the years pass and you begin to see more candles than cake, is it not part of the human condition to become more philosophical about life, the universe and everything?

The trouble is that these days its damn hard to find the time to do this kinda stuff when us marketers are making it increasingly difficult to know yourself physically, let alone philosophically.

Like millions of other humanoids, I trudge along, with forlorn face and tail between legs, to the local ballbusting supermarket to do the weekly shop. I decided, in advance of my latest shop, to turn the trudge into something positive; to engage in and soak up the Woolies experience, and see what I could learn about myself. And so there I stood in the shampoo aisle - auto pilot switched off, flying on manual. By the time I got to the end of the aisle all that I knew about myself was that I knew less.

Apparently, there are 20 types of hair. Which category did mine fall into? What is dull? How lifeless is lifeless, how unmanageable unmanageable? Is greasy oiler than oily or is oily oiler than greasy? Did it need revitalising, enriching or conditioning? Did it need body?

I gave up; inertia had set in. I finally grabbed a Head and Shoulders that I’d used - I suppose quite successfully - before. But I swear next time I’ll go for that one with the PH balance and guacamole protein.

I moved on to toothpaste. Did I have sensitive teeth? How would I know? Were my teeth cruel, brutal even? How discoloured should my teeth be before special care should be taken to whiten them? How tender do my gums have to be before I need to take some special gunk to fix them? Did I need a pump action? Did I need to defeat Tartar?

The deodorants needed to know if I had mild or heavy perspiration. Well, I thought, it depends on the circumstances. Mmmm…I should go for the heavy to be on the safe side…but what if I have frivolous perspiration; will my pores snap shut and my impermeable body slowly swell with incarcerated sweat? Bath gel: if I go for the delicate version, what if the dirt refuses to budge?

Let us all rise and hail our new leader, Fragmentation, a term which loosely covers the seemingly inexorable disintegration and demise of mass market economics, social organisation, political stability and the nuclear family, the unified self, the nature and grounds of knowledge, and inevitably, the all-pervasive, disconnected arrays of vivid images generated by the increasingly hydra-headed media. As Walter (aka John Goodman) said in the movie, The Big Lebowski, am I wrong dude? Maybe, but you can’t argue that the fragmentation of markets into smaller and smaller segments, each with its compliment of carefully positioned products, is everywhere apparent. Even in the new car market you can have any colour, engine size, bodywork variant, trim level, sound system, safety features and optional extras you like. 20 years ago there were a few toothpaste brands, in Woolies I counted more than 30.

Paralleling the proliferation of products, and reinforcing the trend of micro-marketing, distribution channels and advertising media have multiplied. We’ve witnessed the rise of niche retailers that stock a narrow but in-depth assortment of specific product categories. We’ve also witnessed The Long Tail, a phrase first uttered by Chris Anderson to describe the niche strategy of businesses such as Amazon that sell a large number of items in relatively small quantities. In addition, the number of locational options has exploded with out-of-town outlet centres and retail parks, not to mention dedicated shopping channels and, of course, online shopping.

Advertising options have also burgeoned as a result of the proliferation of everything from local free-sheets and ‘lifestyle’ magazines targeted at specialist audiences to the web. Pay TV has contributed to the demise of broadcasting and the rise of narrowcasting, where highly focussed messages can be delivered to specific groups of people. There is more advertising space than ever before (think about your local hospital, airport or health club). Jameson’s predication, as set out in his 1985 work The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, of a ‘perceptual present’, a world of fleeting, fragmented images of hallucinogenic intensity, seems remarkably prescient. With proliferation come challenges for us marketers as it becomes ever more difficult to cut-through and get our brand messages across. There are some tricks you can employ, but I’ll leave that topic for another post.

Thx Herr Peemoeller

It may be un-eco-friendly, and I must say I don’t feel absolutely comfortable about this, but I like cars. My Dad is one of those practical-type Dads who given a few tools can repair just about anything. Just now he pulled the faulty driver’s seat out of his relatively new car and fixed it. I can remember many a time on a cold, winter’s morning begrudgingly handing him spanners and ratchets while he was under the hood graunching his knuckles.

I'm not interested in how cars work. I like to look at them and listen to them. I like to blow my hair back. And I like the thought that they are a means of escape; that they represent freedom and possibility. Thinking of cars as just a method to get from A to B is totally wrong.

My brothers also like cars. From Triumph Stags to Porsches, from Beemers to Jags. So it runs in the family – we like cars.

I thank the Lord then that Henry Ford ignored the “focus group” findings. As he put it, “If I had listened to my customers I would’ve invented a faster horse”.

But if there’s one thing I really dislike about cars then it’s car parks. Now I know they’ve come on a bit lately, but in the main they are piss-stinking, soulless, depressing, concrete-grey-ugly eye-sores. Not to mention the fact that they tend to bring out the worse in humanity, what with the parking space psychology swiftly leading to parking space fury.

And so it was with a more than a little pleasure that I come across this by designer Axel Peemoeller who has worked out the math to create, optically directional car park signage that appears to hang in the air. Found in the car park of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, there's no technowizardy here, just a man with a can of paint and a few severely skewed letters. The result: mindbending, v smart and surely a Eureka moment. Perhaps a car manufacturer that wishes to position itself as innovative could join up with Mr Pee to create these signs across all major car parks in Australia…Whatever, well done Mr Pee, and thx for making my car park experience just a little bit less painful.

A blog about Marketing, Brands, Advertising...and other stuff

I’ve just realised I’ve committed a cardinal sin. How can I expect you to read my blog without knowing who the hell I am? Am I worth listening to? Am I a reliable observer?

Well the answer to the last question is easy…no, I am not a reliable observer. I have 10 years of various marketing, brand and advertising experience. I have my opinions and you have yours. All I can ask is that you bear with me and hear me out, as we venture out on this path of marketing discovery. And though the road may be rocky ahead with ravines to cross and mountains to climb and all that kinda stuff, I hope the journey will be, at worst, interesting.

Whatever the case may be, the time for synoptic circumlocutions has now passed…the final countdown has begun. But before lift-off commences, it may be worthwhile making a small but important point.

Marketing is in crisis.

Much has been written and said about the demise of marketing. As much as large corporations talk the talk about being a customer-centric organisation, rarely do they walk the walk. When were you last on the receiving end of really great service? (That’s a rhetorical question by the way.) Brands promise certain experiences and raise expectations through their communications. Then you wander down to one of their stores and when you ask for assistance you are faced with an 18 year old sales assistant who does not assist you in the sale (in fact they often mislead or confuse). Man, it gets me mad and I know I’m not alone. (I’ll be writing about linking the brand promise to employee behaviour in a future post.)

With increasing media fragmentation, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to get their messages across. We can screen out TV commercial messages via Tivo and DVD Recorders. Indeed, many are doing away with their TV completely, setting up their 20-inch widescreen iMac centre-stage in the lounge and feeding it with content from iTunes, DVDs and other web-based media services. They are asserting an iconoclastic form of control over their media lives.

Over-capacity, a perceived lack of differentiation, and commoditization are common characteristics of markets across the developed world. More people than ever have a marketing orientation, with many aware of and hostile to the machinations of the marketing machine – Douglas Coupland’s prescient and seminal book Generation X published in 1992 summed up this attitude perfectly with a chapter entitled ‘I am not a target market’. The trust we have in organisations, let alone one another, is at an all time low. For us professional communicators, this makes things tricky.

What do we need to do? We need to be more innovative and creative than ever before to make punters sit up, listen and take notice. We need to involve, engage and entertain consumers to attract them. Sometimes, being different isn’t the only way, sometimes we need to tease them, sometimes we need to play heard to get. Brands should look to tell great stories, that are authentic and likely to spread (I tip my hat to Seth Godin here).

Above all, from an advertising point of view, I believe we must seek to make an emotional connection with people, to reach out and touch people, be it to make them laugh, feel uncomfortable, surprised etc. Festinger, with his Cognitive Dissonance Theory, told us long ago in 1959 that people decide emotionally and justify with logic, and yet how many communications do we see that focus purely on the rational factors, ordained from above by super-analytical and consumer illiterate Finance Directors-slash-CEOs. The battle lines have been drawn…

What is this thing called 'Cool'?

Now, some of the more observant among you may have noticed that the title of my blog is taken from the iconic 1967 movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’. Not only is it one of my favourite films, but when I saw it as an impressionable teenager it had a profound effect on me. The central character, Luke, played by the brilliant Paul Newman, is a war hero who is sentenced to 2 years on the chain gang in the Deep South for cutting the heads off parking meters. Essentially, Newman plays a character that stands up to authority (in this case, the prison system and the prisoners’ ‘rules’). He is an archetypical rebel and he is cool.

But the film is more complex than that. It also questions whether the establishment is vulnerable to rebellion at all. It is a pessimistic film about the possibility of justice, reform, and individualism. In the end Luke dies for his sins (perhaps perpetrated during the war) and to an outside observer, his reification as a folk legend among a small band of convicts seems like a hollow victory at best. The parallel to the founding of Christianity is a fascinating aspect of the story (though don’t get me wrong, this is not a religious film).

This is reinforced in one scene where, to settle a dispute, Luke boxes a fellow prisoner, Dragline (he later in the film becomes Luke’s biggest fan and worshipper). Dragline beats him to a pulp, but despite the entreaties of the other prisoners and ultimately Dragline himself, Luke refuses to stay down. Finally Dragline is too disgusted to continue. He walks away, leaving the ring to the battered and stumbling Luke. This is the turning point of the movie, and ostensibly demonstrates its main theme, that spirit can overcome material adversity.

As I’ll be mainly writing about marketing and brand stuff in this blog, I thought a good starting point for my blog would be to examine the essence of ‘cool’ or what makes a person, something or a brand ‘cool’.

In a way, Luke is cool because he steadfastly refuses to change, irrespective of what others do to him or say to him. It’s a bit like Muhammad Ali’s stance on the Vietnam War. Non-conformity seems to be a key aspect of being ‘cool’, but not always. A bunch of 60 year olds turning up at a Ministry of Sound club wearing tie-die are not conforming, but you’d wish they would.

Some see ‘cool’ as ‘trendy’ – those that are sitting at the tip of the adoption curve. It is said that this ‘community’ can identify cool before the conservative mainstream. So if cool means trendy then making something cool just means getting the endorsement of ‘opinion leaders’.

But in this sped-up world, the time between inception, adoption and disposal is crunched rendering opinion leaders foresight as utterly redundant. So if ‘trendy’ doesn’t mean ‘trendy’, then 'cool' definitely can’t.

So back to Cool Hand Luke. Perhaps providing a reference point around which like-minded people can gravitate is it. ‘Cool’ has something to do with believing and standing for something, it is sustained, it has permanence. Brands and bands who believe in something tend to endure.

But it’s more than that. Energy and vitality is crucial, especially for Brands – to present what you stand for in fresh and innovative ways. And for brands, it also means standards. Keeping standards high is the secret of Apple and Adidas. These brands deliver consistency. Take Coca-Cola, as Andy Warhol eloquently put it, “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking…Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it and you know it.”

So forget trends (especially fads that masquerade as trends) and non-conforming, the 3 things that help make a brand cool are: a firm sustained belief in something, energy and high standards.

And, lest we forget, cool does not try. Cool is.

I’m not saying all brands need to try to be cool. Look at the Number 1 car manufacturer in the world. Nobody would accuse Toyota of being cool. But the car brand that goes down the path of Apple, Adidas, Coca-Cola or Nike…now, wouldn’t that be cool?