Archive for October, 2009
If you hang out in Times Square in New York City, especially at night, it can feel like you’re always watching something. Pretty soon all your senses are overloaded with the endless electronic billboards. At some level this is the charm of being in Times Square but now, at least one marketing expert is claiming that as a marketing tool, this sensory overload just doesn’t work. Martin Lindstrom, among Time Magazine’s 100 of the world’s most influential people, says the brain can actually delete your marketing message if it’s not managed correctly. Strong word there – delete.
Lindstrom, who has been peddling his book, “Buyology,” noted that during the Beijing Olympics, while Coca-Cola spent heavily to be a major sponsor, 60 percent of Chinese people thought Pepsi was the major sponsor. Ouch. What the brain likes, says Lindstrom is to experience your product. So rather than a Coke billboard flashing the words, “Refresh Yourself,” all day long, you should have Refresh Yourself parties around the world. Everybody likes parties. Rather than a logo which informs the brain that marketing is occurring, be more subliminal with say, the color red, or the smell of coffee.
Lindstrom may or may not be on to something there but others are saying if you want people to want your stuff, you need to create scarcity. “Scarcity sells,” says Keith Monaghan, another marketing strategist. He cited the Knob Creek Bourbon producers (The Jim Beam folks), who posted copy informing customers that they would sell no bourbon before it was aged for nine years – the full nine years and nothing short of that. As such they would run out of bourbon to sell. Fans of the brand had no choice. They obsessed and then they presumably stocked up. Of course the strategy of scarcity may work better for small batch bourbon than for other beverages.
It could be the perfect match or the match made in Heaven or it could be the color of money or …well you get the picture. Designers everywhere can celebrate the marriage of the world’s color authority to the world’s app authority in the form of myPANTONE. The folks at Pantone think of it as a digital, portable design studio in the pockets of designers. No more cumbersome guides. No more guessing games about the true type of any given color. Take a photo with your iPhone and match it to the closest Pantone colors.
It was of course the Pantone folks who popularized molten orange as a sought after color that now adorns all sorts of products including the Ford’s new F-150. And it isn’t easy work. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t a color psychic in the backrooms of the Pantone headquarters who predicts the next hot color trend. Though this could be a pretty efficient method. Instead their people fan out across the globe into markets, neighborhoods, trade shows and even movie houses to find popular colors.
Last spring they checked out the runways where Super Lemon, Pantone number 14-0754 was thought to bring a fun, optimistic outlook, with its luminosity determined to evoke a smile. On an interesting note, brown used to be a somewhat scorned color due to its resemblance to mud. Then along came Starbucks and fine chocolates and suddenly brown was a glorious thing to behold. This fall they favor red, purple and honey yellow. Among their top ten for the upcoming spring season are tomato puree, aurora and turquoise. But for the top favorite color of all time, Americans are into blue. Blue Man group? Eyes of blue? Violets? Blue Dog Democrats? The little blue … well let’s just leave it there.
Here is a video unrelated to color.
Literature is literature and tweets are tweets, but now the twain have met. Coming soon to a shelf near you is a new literary work that bridges the digital divide by reducing thousands of pages of dialog and prose down to mere characters – digital not literary characters – lol? Yes, there are folks working to solve the great problems of the world. Medical researchers are looking at wood as a replacement for bone. Car companies are researching hybrids. Vera Wang is saving us from bad bridal dresses. But what we really need is to be rescued from verboseness.
Enter Twitterature, a book of summarized literature in Tweet form. Each book is covered in twenty or fewer Tweets of 140 characters. Harry Potter’s 784 pages are now down to 2,800 characters. From Sherlock Holmes, “Continuing investigation. Made brilliant deductions on many snorts and very little evidence. Notice salt deposits on factory owner’s shoes?” O Romeo, Romeo, doesn’t this come in so very handy for Shakespeare? Especially considering how tough it is to read those “wherefore art thou” and other Old English. Even better, Hamlet actually gets to his point faster so he can get to sleep and perchance dream. And isn’t it better to “be” than not anyway?
Following in a long line of ventures launched from the dorm room, Twitterature is the brainstorm of two roommates at the University of Chicago. While others are outraged at this butchering of great literature, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin are defending their work by noting that back in the day, the populace was also outraged at Martin Luther for translating the Bible from Latin to German – though this made it more accessible. Not known if outrage occurred at the English Bible. Now if only there were Twexts like this for the economy, we might be onto something.
In the wide world of business it is often said that larger companies like big government are dinosaurs, unable to be flexible and agile in the face of change. Too much bureaucracy or layers of management to turn on a dime. Whether or not this is the case, none other than the Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company is trying to turn that sort of thinking on its head. Upon arriving at his post, CEO Jeff Kindler discovered that there were 14 layers of management between himself and the company’s scientists who were working at 21 different locations across the globe. How did they ever get anything done?
Since then Kindler has been fine tune tuning company management to better focus on Pfizer’s goals – creating new drugs to treat illnesses, getting them through the FDA approval system and ultimately selling the drugs. To this end, he is cutting out any process that seems too convoluted. Where once there were numerous R & D locations full of chemists collaborating on the same projects, Kindler has downsized to just four. Each with its scientists working on the same project. All the better for communication. Instead of 14 layers of management there are now eight. And it is probably now possible to get a paperclip without going through several committees.
But Pfizer isn’t Kindler’s first attempt at streamlining a big company. He once worked for Boston Market where he shut down 100 stores to save headaches. If the Australians would rather have Shrimp on the Barbie why should Boston Market keep trying to sell them rotisserie chicken? Such a formula could very well lead to a better business model whether you’re selling chickens or flu shots but who knows? Either way, we’re guessing that one future day Amazon.com just might hire him to help them sort out the increasingly competitive e-reader market. Kindler for the Kindle?