You Brand

Names are important. We like to hear our name. “Hey + name” sounds friendlier than “Hey you”. For premium brands it is even more important. As a matter of fact it is vital. “I bought a car” is not really helpful for the brand you bought it from.

A premium brand like Hermès should know that. Hermès was founded by Thierry Hermès back in 1837 – the brand name is therefore not just a pseudoword, it is a ‘real’ name – and is about as premium as it gets.

They have a store in Munich and I’ve been a customer for several years. I happen to like their ties, even though they are insanely expensive. Every January they invite me to a sale (if you can call it that at Hermès), which is nice.

What annoys me however is that they seem to be unable to get my last name right (see photo: no ‘Umlaut’, no ‘s’ at the end).

All the fancy brochures and expensive advertising campaigns will ultimately fail, if you don’t know your customers and that includes their names.

As this picture clearly demonstrates, agricultural methods and marketing have a lot in common.

Over the years, monocultures have become very popular. It is all about planting crops with genetic similarity. These have uniform growing habits and requirements, which result in greater yields on less land. Planting, maintenance and harvesting are standardized. Sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly what marketers try to achieve with traditional advertising in mass media?

Next time you look in the mirror, just imagine seeing a head of lettuce. After all, you’re being treated like one.

How do you feel being manured?

The other day I wrote that advertising’s biggest enemy is advertising itself.

Looking at many ads today – if I have the time and desire to do so – I ask myself what the brands behind the ads are trying to tell me. Is there a clear message, a call for action, a suggestion that adds value for me personally? In other words, does it engage and ‘turn me on’? If it does, I will act and follow their suggestion. If it doesn’t, I won’t. Does this sound too simple? Well it is simple, advertising is no rocket science. It was a big mistake to turn advertising into a science over the years, because it meant that advertising often stopped being an art. The negative consequences as regards creativity are well known.

If the brand knows exactly what is to be to achieved with the campaign, the necessary metrics to measure success or failure can be defined accordingly. CPM just says how much it will cost to ‘show’ the ad to one thousand viewers. Cost being an exclusion criteria in the rational world of ‘scientific’ advertising led to CPM being used by many brands as a benchmark to evaluate campaigns.

In today’s world, just showing an ad to as many consumers as possible for a short period of time without initializing a productive interaction means that the brand is not exploiting the full potential of advertising. Relying on CPM to evaluate the ad is therefore a mistake, i.e. CPM = Cost per Mistake

Actually I love advertising, especially TVC’s. The commercial break being an interruption of the program I actually want to watch, I use it to check my Emails, get myself something to drink, check what’s happening on other channels etc.

Nevertheless I’m one of thousands being counted to determine the CPT. Advertising is bought on the basis of what it costs to be shown to one thousand viewers and the CPT is still used as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of a campaign. This does not strike me as being terribly efficient in today’s media world, because many people are not watching what they are being shown. Like me they use the commercial break to do all sorts of other things.

Why are so many people ignoring traditional advertising and even railing against it?

In my opinion there are quite a few reasons, some more obvious than others. Today I would like to talk about quality. There are too many boring ads. If the commercial break is built on the principle of interruption, why not do it in a creative way? Tell a story, be credible, entertain your audience, deliver information that adds value for them – there are many things an advertiser can do to prevent me and others from checking Emails during the commercial break.

Successful brands polarize. Trying to be everybody’s darling means you won’t be noticed by anybody. Their advertising needs to polarize as well, since it is an extension of the brand. If it’s perceived as being boring, loud, dumb, worthless, annoying, the consumer will eventually look at the brand the same way. Perception is reality.

But the problem is more often than not the client and not the agency. An agency can only be as good as their client allows them to be.

What do you do during commercial breaks?

Managers aim to please………..their CEO! Rightfully so, unless the CEO becomes their main and only target audience. Chances of this happening in an old-fashioned command and control corporate organization are bigger than you think. Not everybody has direct access to the CEO, creating positive awareness through other channels can therefore be a good career strategy. Placing advertisements in newspapers that the CEO reads are one way of doing that. It indirectly suggests that his marketing department is doing its job in promoting the brand. In a world where the main target groups were reading the same newspaper(s) as the CEO, this was an effective media plan. In a world where they don’t, it obviously is not.

Is your CEO still reading a newspaper?

More and more people don’t trust advertising. A recent GfK survey carried out in Spring 2009 in Europe and the US found that only 28% trust advertising managers, only politicians were found to be less trustworthy. As Howard Schultz aptly analyzed:In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. 40 years less than 10% of the public believed it was true.Is advertising dying, because people think it’s lying?

In the world before the Internet, one way media dominated. In this world, brands used advertising to address and influence target consumers ‘efficiently’ – ‘reach’ became the magic word and with it CPM (cost per thousand views of the ad) became the benchmark to calculate the relative cost of the campaign. A dialogue with the consumer was not on the agenda!

Since the 60ies, one way media channels exploded and they effectively developed two revenue models:They sold content to their audience and they ‘sold’ their audience to the advertising industry. Hence the amount of advertising exploded as well. The following 2 examples illustrate this point perfectly:

In 1965 it was possible to ‘reach’ 80% of the 18-49 year age group with 3 60-second Television commercials. In 2002 a brand needed 112 Television commercials to reach the same target.

In 2006 the average US consumer was exposed to approximately 5.000 advertising messages per day. Assuming a 16-hour day, that means 1 ad every 11,6 seconds

It is not surprising that consumers are increasingly annoyed with the omnipresent, impersonal brand monologue in one way media accompanied by an increasing loss of trust and a decline in quality caused by rapidly increasing demand.

Is advertising doomed to die? I personally don’t think so and will share my views in the upcoming posts.

What do you think?