Results tagged “marketing” from Uncivil Society
Somehow I don't think the bunch in the picture above was officially licensed, but the branded fruit & vegetables in this Slate article were. My thoughts on the lesson for social enterprise over on JustMeans, along with a look at the business of charitable benefits.
Almost everything about marketing is the opposite of the typical manager's approach to running a business. Marketing is illogical and definitely not analytical. Marketing is intuitive and holistic.
We're concerned, however, that this message is being ignored by the marketing community, who seem to be drifting from the right to the left -- from a right-brain approach to a left-brain approach. . .
Take leadership, for example.
Nothing about a brand is more valuable than its market leadership. If a brand loses its leadership, it loses its most significant advantage in the marketplace. That valuable position is worth protecting. And advertising is the best way to protect it. Nike in athletic shoes. Heinz in ketchup. Rolex in watches.
Suppose a leading brand spends $50 million a year on advertising. And suppose that brand's market share doesn't budge at all. Was that $50 million wasted? Not necessarily.
Advertising as insurance
Advertising is more like insurance than it is like an investment. What's your "return on investment" of a five-year term life insurance policy if you don't die?Zero.
But, of course, you don't buy an insurance policy to make money. You buy an insurance policy to protect your family in case you die.
The overall practice of marketing is not mathematically based, although subsets of the discipline may be: direct marketing, research, media selection.
Marketing is certainly not 70% mathematics. It's not even 1% mathematics. (As a math major in college, I don't think I've ever used integral calculus or differential equations or any other mathematical concept in our marketing practice.)
Marketing is a discipline that can only be learned by exposure to marketing case histories over an extensive period of time.
Mathematics is logical. Marketing is not. That's why marketing is so difficult to learn.
Prickly Situation at the Bronx Zoo from Gothamist on Vimeo.
A clever PSA in response to New York State budget cuts. More at WCS.org, via Gothamist.
I once had a conversation with a charity leader who expressed frustration with the fact that images of homeless people and recovering drug users had little fundraising appeal compared to other charities' pictures of babies and puppies. It's a fair point--evolutionary scientists note that we're coded to want to protect cute, soft, dependent li'l critters. Babies are the reason, of course, but canines have managed to leverage our instincts by mimicking the traits of human infants and young children well into doggy adulthood--which is perhaps one reason the tax code defines charitable activity to include "the prevention of cruelty to children and animals."
It's something I've been thinking about a bit this holiday season, thanks to attempts to raise funds or market products with commercials set to Silent Night--a musical expression of the help-the-baby drive. The first is for the ASPCA. The second, a popular Pampers commercial that has been used not just to sell diapers, but for a cause marketing tie-in. The third--Silent Night in the rainforest.
In my work I hear a lot about how for-profit/nonprofit cause marketing partnerships. The emphasis is usually on the positive--doing well by doing good, changing the way we do business, and so forth. What we don't see enough of are detailed reviews of how such projects actually work in practice, warts and all.
I especially want to emphasize those last three words. I've read plenty of rah-rah case studies where the critical analysis echoes the oh-so-clever answer every law student gives when a firm inquires as to one's greatest weakness: "I work too hard." But, like people, joint ventures are much more complex, and they'll never reach their potential if we pretend that even their weaknesses are above average.
Case in point: the breaking controversy of the Knight Foundation/MTV Young Creators' Award. The Knight Foundation's News Challenge program has produced a heap o' fantastic work--in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, I personally know and recommended one of the winning teams in a different (i.e., non-MTV-related) grant program.
However, the Knight/MTV partnership has generated a considerable amount of unhappiness among the young people who worked for it. Like Willy Loman, the correspondents in the Knight/MTV community journalist program worked unto exhaustion, long hours (allegedly) without pay--and what's worse, it's pay they were contractually obligated to receive. Since the experience seems to have spawned some disillusionment, attention must be paid.
The lesson now has become so relevant to the news we were covering - and our experience with MTV at the intersection of our nation’s financial crisis, the meltdown of traditional news media - and how the innocent idealism of youth that helped change a nation’s course - was exploited. What happened would wake us all up - on the Street Team, to the Real World.
EricaAmerica has the inside scoop; Gawker is looking for more.
Porn DVDs for Africa inspire this compelling cri de couer on charitable marketing from Wronging Rights, via Blood and Milk.
Isn't there something peculiar about placing added value on products that somehow involve people who have been raped, tortured, infected with HIV, diarrhea'd to death, or otherwise atrocitied? Kate and I have been waiting for "sex toys made by sex slaves," which we assume would be the ultimate victim craft. If you're going to combine rampant consumerism with a prurient interest in other people's suffering, you should really go for it.
The key issue here isn't the porn DVD that inspired this post; it's the extent to which charity has become the new colonialism. We're not as different from the nineteenth century as we would like to think.
Master marketer Schmuel Tennenhaus has created a creative and popular guerilla ad campaign for Vista--so of course, Microsoft wants to shut him down.
Maybe there's a way to compromise--like, say, putting the Vista logo on a yarmulke!
Disney co-produces an animated Bollywood film in this Indian joint venture. Via FurryNews.
One of the things we chat about in my entrepreneurship class is the repurposing of old media in new contexts. The candle flips from illumination to atmosphere; the horse, from engine to entertainment; the museum, from gateway to the new to mausoleum for the old.
Above: the faux bookstore facade of new Lower East Side hotspot The Eldridge, home of the apparently recession-proof $32 cocktail.
The place has already turned away one would-be patron — a book collector who spotted a certain tome in the window that he had spent 25 years looking for. Sorry, buddy, not tonight.
Should have worked even later last night--would have seen this on the Woolworth Building, which is across from my office. Ah well. Accounts of the cross-marketing event can be found here and here, which apparently also included flashing the bat-signal onto the main campus of Pace University, where I teach.
The commodification of city space is an increasingly important question. I'd be interested in learning what approvals the PR firm behind this obtained in order to run the event.
To see the importance of considering the interests of various local communities, one need only look at the negative reaction to the decision to move all the Macy's fireworks downtown to accommodate NBC, thereby cutting out the Queens and midtown viewers who gathered to watch from their traditional viewing locations. Should residents of New York and its surrounding environs have a say in how the skyline becomes a promotional tool?
The next ten days are, I hope, the last of the frantic end-of-semester deadline dooms (article, conferences) before I can get to the various projects I have on hold for June. That's why the posts are a little less sustained and a lot more of the cool-things-I-want-to-archive variety.
Or uncool things.
These three articles came across my screen today and for some reason converged:
- Rising cost of airfares will alter comics convention plans
- Expensive comics crossovers--a luxury good from boom times?
- NYC Food Bank demand up 24%; donations down 44%
From the last link, a Dylanesque quote that resonates on several levels: "We have a lot of cereal but we don't have enough milk."
Where I'm going with this is not the gratuitous and ultimately unhelpful puritanical assertion that comics are frivolous compared to food or some such--far from it, actually. Social gatherings and creative expression are essential aspects of human identity, and to say that we should set these aside until poverty is gone is to strike a Faustian bargain in reverse--we go to hell now to get nothing in the future. Moreover, rumor has it that at least one or two people in the comics industry use it to get money so they can buy food themselves. But as information like the above propagates through the system, so too will the pressure to take palliative action, some of which will be counterproductive over the long term.
In a somewhat related note, the following comment on the Hero Initiative's Gene Colan fundraiser merits a response:
Um… way to come up with a great idea then mess it up.
If this is to raise money for Gene, why would you limit it to 250 pieces???
That’s only $6,250!!!! Unless they’re planning on releasing 20 different covers or his illness is only an ingrown toenail, it’s not gonna help too much.
Hospitals charge on average $5,000 just to STAY in the hospital for a week. This doesn’t include doctors fees and surgery costs.
I hear this sort of thing all the time in my primary gig--I teach & write about charity & business--so a word of explanation. What you hope for in a fundraiser like this is
- to get people to buy a sizable number of goods they wouldn't otherwise buy at a price they wouldn't otherwise pay, and
- to inspire people to make additional donations both for the immediate need and general programs.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, increasing the number of available items does not necessarily increase the amount of money raised. It can actually create a sense of abundance, which in turn can depress sales & contributions compared to a market with a relatively limited supply. This is often referred to as the scarcity principle, and it has applications in a number of areas of life beyond the marketing of goods.
Like, um, becoming a "chick magnet"--
Oy.
Another example of education-as-entertainment, by Ezra Klein.
It's this latter sense of the word that comes to mind as I see the nonprofit and social enterprise communities react to the latest PR regarding the OpenSocial Foundation, the Google-MySpace-Yahoo nonprofit promoting an open API for online social networks. For the do-gooder community, this is a Moment of Affirmation--Nonprofit! Hybrid! Open Source! Information Revolution! It's a party with everything except dancing Ewoks, although I expect someone to create a .gif of that soon enough.
And that's exactly what the big three expected and wanted us to do. The fact is, OpenSocial is a deliberate attempt to leverage the cultural biases of the online community against Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention online social networks popular outside the U.S. Social networks, while popular, have proven somewhat difficult to commodify. The Foundation serves as a means to stigmatize the competition by branding it as closed and commercial, even as Google-MySpace-Yahoo leverage their own considerable market resources to profit from the work.
Mind you, I'm not criticizing GMY for doing this--it's rather savvy, and were I in management at any of these companies I'd recommend doing the same thing. I respect the strategy in the same way I do the marketing genius of PT Barnum and Vince McMahon, both of whom used cultural psychology to build entertainment empires.
I'm less enthused about our own recurring tendency to drink the latest Kool-Aid ladled to us in the name of higher good. Social enterprise is supposed to be a movement characterized by business savvy, but time and again we're all-too-eager to imbue someone else's tactics with our own moral hue.
This isn't a sign that we're sophisticated; it marks us as rubes.
Here's a story from the other side: a university that has endorsed a student group's downloadable hiphop mixtape to attract prospective students. For a cutting-edge example of nonprofit web marketing 2.0, check out ProHipHop.com and the Hip Hop Congress mix.
My favorite quote is from one of the student performers, capturing how much better students understand the emerging marketplace than many so-called experts:
"It's more unique than a T-shirt or a coozie."
