Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
The brand truth: ‘You are what you do’
Last night, in a rugged NBA playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Denver Nuggets, LA’s Kobe Bryant was sent sprawling to the floor after being tripped by Denver’s Dahntay Jones. After seeing the TV replay, the ABC announcers all believed Jones intentionally tripped Bryant, although the referees missed the obvious foul. Play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, in an apparent defense of Jones, said the Denver player was not considered “a dirty player” in the NBA. To which analyst Jeff Van Gundy responded, “You are what you do.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter whether Jones is considered a clean or dirty player, because that was a dirty play. And if he continues to make plays like that (in an earlier game Jones pushed Bryant in the back as Bryant went in for a layup), he’ll earn an undesirable reputation as a dirty player.
Maybe only an NBA fan and branding consultant like me would offer Van Gundy’s words as a caution to those who oversee their firm’s brand. All of our carefully researched and cultivated efforts to develop a certain image among our stakeholders are only as effective as the collective behavior of our organization. That’s why I believe managing your business’ brand or reputation is not simply an exercise in marketing. Who you say your business is in your marketing counts for far less than what you do as a business.
Logos and slogans do not define your brand. Actions do. When the spotlight is bright and the pressure to perform is great, how do the executives and employees of your organization behave? That’s where you’ll find the truth of your brand.
Starbucks or McCoffee? No thanks
Starbucks is spending big ad bucks to gain the upper hand in its coffee confrontation with McDonald’s McCafe. What’s important to me about this duel is the false — and ultimately unsustainable — choice this campaign sets up. (UPDATE: McDonald’s announces huge promotional blitz for McCafe.)
According to Ad Age:
The high-end coffee retailer is breaking a series of long form, full-page newspaper ads Sunday (May 3), designed to tell the brand’s “story” while warning consumers about the dangers of trading down. It’s all part of its effort to combat consumer perception about its prices and separate itself from McDonald’s expected mass-market assault for its McCafe launch. Starbucks’ print ads, designed on burlap-sack backgrounds, have headlines such as “It’s not what you’re buying, it’s what you’re buying into.” The ads lay out what separates Starbucks from the competition, such as its practice of buying fair-trade beans and providing health care for employees who work more than 20 hours a week.
Living in Portland, Ore., I can tell you that Starbucks doesn’t separate itself from the competition on the basis of fair-trade, health care or other laudatory practices. That is, if you consider Starbucks’ competition to also include the locally owned, independent coffee merchants and cafes, which we in Portland enjoy throughout our great city.
In the battle of national, publicly owned retail chains, mom & pop’s and larger independents are a complete after-thought. And yet they are the ones who suffer most, along with the communities that are so much better off for having them around. Think Wal-Mart and its devastating impact on local economies and small local businesses as it tries to mow down big-box competitors like Target. The loss of the local independents are simply collateral damage in the national and global business wars.
Assuming I had no other options, I would choose Starbucks over McDonald’s because it’s a more socially and environmentally responsible corporation. That’s what Starbucks wants to hear. What they don’t want to hear is that I actually have dozens of great coffee options and none of them involve McDonald’s or Starbucks. My choices are local and they’re sustainable. I don’t care to choose between who’s less bad. I want to support the business owners who genuinely care about my community because this is their community, too. Large publicly traded corporations ruled by the financial bottom line are “dead ends,” as one socially responsible investment advisor I know asserts. Starbucks may be more responsible than McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make them sustainable.
To borrow the Starbucks advertising punch line, what I’m “buying into” is local.
Time to retire ‘green marketing’
With Earth Day 2009 behind us, I have a suggestion: Let’s acknowledge “green marketing” has outlived its usefulness and put our energy into redefining marketing itself.
Green marketing had a good run. It has responded to the rising green demands of customers. And it’s helped raise the environmental conscience of many others. Unfortunately, marketing as it’s most widely practiced remains the fuel for unsustainable consumption. And green marketing doesn’t go nearly far enough to change that.
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines green marketing three ways:
- (retailing definition) The marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe.
- (social marketing definition) The development and marketing of products designed to minimize negative effects on the physical environment or to improve its quality.
- (environments definition) The efforts by organizations to produce, promote, package, and reclaim products in a manner that is sensitive or responsive to ecological concerns.
I added the emphasis to products to underscore the limitation of green marketing. Absolutely, we must develop and promote products that are ecologically sensitive and safe. And green marketing has encouraged more eco-friendly product consumption. However, it utterly fails to address two unsustainable conditions:
- Too much consumption by rich people and countries: According to the World Wildlife Foundation, the ecological footprint* of the United States in 2005 was 9.4 (global hectares per person); the world average was 2.7. For high-income countries it was 6.4; for low-income countries 1.0.
- Too little consumption by poor people and countries: Although progress has been made on reducing extreme poverty in recent decades, the World Bank estimates that 1.4 billion people still lived on less than US $1.25 a day in 2005.
Over consumption and inequitable consumption explain much of what troubles our world. If marketers really want to make a difference, they’ll look far beyond green products. And focus instead on how to curb the material cravings of the affluent and narrow the rich-poor gap.
We’re seeing signs of green marketing morphing into “sustainable marketing.” That’s an improvement. It situates marketing in a larger triple-bottom-line context: people, planet, profit. Sustainable marketing, however, implies there is something known as “unsustainable marketing” — which of course there is, most anywhere you look.
We need sustainability embedded in marketing. In other words, marketing — by definition — must be sustainable. There is no green marketing or sustainable marketing. There’s only marketing. And it’s sustainable. Or at least that’s the idea.
What does sustainability mean? I rely on the widely used definition from the Brundtland Commission**: “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The AMA, meanwhile, defines marketing (inelegantly) as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
So marketing newly defined could appear something like this:
Delivering value to customers and managing customer relationships in ways that meet the needs of the organization and its stakeholders without compromising the ability of all humans, present and future, to meet their own needs.
Still doesn’t roll of the tongue, I know. But this alternative concept of marketing is profoundly different. No longer will it be enough to satisfy our customers for their benefit and that of our organization and stakeholders (especially shareholders). This business-as-usual approach to marketing has created too few winners and too many losers.
The world could look very different if marketers accept responsibility for ensuring their organizations (or clients) are not jeopardizing the ability of others to meet their needs. In other words, doing our jobs can’t mean satisfying customers, shareholders or bosses at a cost to the health of individuals, communities and environments now and for generations to come. How we avoid that won’t always be obvious. The point is to acknowledge there can be broad social and ecological consequences to our actions and lines we don’t knowingly cross.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the AMA and academia to get behind a new vision of marketing. They’ll follow the real practices of real marketers. Let’s show them the way.
*According to the World Wildlife Federation, “A country’s footprint is the sum of all the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fibre and timber it consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted when it uses energy, and to provide space for its infrastructure.” WWF also says, “If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.”
** Friend Brian Setzler at TriLibrium informs me two key concepts are usually excluded or overlooked when referring to the Brundtland definition: “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”
The endless lengths marketers go to get us to buy
Recession be damned. If there’s a way to get people to part with their money, by God, marketers are going to discover and use it. Today’s example? Neuromarketing.
Apparently there’s no recession in Martin Lindstrom’s business, Buyology, Inc. His firm takes its name from his book “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.” Consumer products companies are flying him around the world to learn what he knows about what Marketing News calls “the last frontier of marketing research: the consumer’s subconscious mind.”
Lindstrom’s book, published in 2008, sets him up nicely as an expert on neuromarketing, which he says “is to use the latest brain science to understand the consumer’s behavior.” Or as his book title says, “Why We Buy.” (I confess I haven’t read it.)
Nobel Peace Prize winner and neuroscientist Eric Kandel has said the ultimate remaining challenge of the biological sciences is to “understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.” In the last five years or so, this pursuit has spawned neuromarketing.
Just as marketers teamed with psychologists after World War II to create the field of consumer psychology, the largest brands are now looking to harness the methods and technology of neuroscience to study our brain responses to marketing stimuli. Neuromarketing is just the latest chapter in a long history of marketers learning to produce better and better-targeted marketing messages that will lead us to buy.
What struck me most about Lindstrom’s interview in the latest issue of Marketing News (no article link available yet) is this comment:
“My intention was to write a book so, hopefully, the whole world could engage in a debate and say: ‘Are we going too far? And if we’re going too far, should we have regulations around this?’ Now, here’s the bad news on this one. The ethical debate has not appeared so far.”
Lindstrom is right. There’s been no debate. But he’s not going to be the one to spark it, given he claims to work with 17 of the world’s largest brands, 12 of which are using neuromarketing. His vested interest is in seeing this new field flourish, not in drawing attention to its questionable reason for existence.
I would love to see a thorough debate of neuromarketing. Just as I’d welcome a public debate on the ethics of word of mouth marketing. But my concern is less with neuromarketing itself than with what it says about the marketing industry: Will there ever be an end to the lengths marketers will go to get us to buy? After neuromarketing, what’s next? Cloning loyal consumers of our brand? If you want some answers read journalist Lucas Conley’s superb book, “Obsessive Branding Disorder.” Or if you’re intrigued by neuromarketing, read the blog.
If humans hope to have a sustainable future, they must consume less. A lot less. A recession is one way to put a stop to buying. A better way is for the choice to be voluntary. What the world really needs is to understand how to trigger or train the subconscious mind to reject the marketing stimuli that entice us to buy more crap we don’t need and can’t afford.
Here’s a book waiting to be written: “DoNotBuyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Shouldn’t Buy.” If you write it, I’ll buy it. No MRI required.
Greenwashing is just the tip of the marketing iceberg
Greenwashing is a regrettable practice across the business world today. And I applaud initiatives such as the Greenwashing Index to prevent the practice from spreading.
I’m concerned, however, that greenwashing may be distracting marketing executives and educators from an even more distressing matter: The vast number of companies, large and small, that even today don’t give lip service to green or sustainable products or practices. They don’t pretend to be sustainable, don’t promise to become sustainable, don’t understand what it means to be sustainable and, frankly, don’t appear to care.
The marketing and advertising of these companies remain what they’ve always been: attempts to promote and sell products and services, without a hint of green gloss. They stress the usual customer benefits: greater value, quality, innovation, convenience, luxury, responsiveness, ROI and the like. But they make no claims to be more earth-friendly, socially responsible or otherwise green or sustainable. These businesses continue to do what they’ve always done, with no obvious regard or accountability for the environmental or social impact of their actions now or across future generations, except perhaps as required by law, rule or regulation.
I don’t know what percentage of businesses are making concerted efforts to become far more sustainable. I’d wager it’s a small minority. One reason the media features companies that embrace sustainability is they are the exceptions. If every company was going green, there would be no story. And one reason businesses tout the “greenness” of their products or practices (sometimes resorting to greenwashing) is they see a competitive or “first mover” advantage. Again, if all companies produced sustainable goods or services, that advantage disappears.
The point is too few businesses are serious about sustainability today. And that should have brand managers, PR counselors, ad execs, social media mavens and all other marketers up in arms.
I don’t want to minimize the seriousness of greenwashing — no company should be allowed an advantage through false or deceptive marketing. But who should worry us more:
- The few unethical companies (and their marketers) trying to pull the green wool over our eyes? Or…
- The many businesses making truthful, “non-green” claims that contribute to excessive or inequitable consumption and their inevitable byproducts: natural resource depletion, ecological damage, climate change, poverty?
Marketers committed to sustainability have a perfect opportunity in this worsening recession to drive home a critical point among their not-so-green peers: It’s time to examine the very role of marketers in fueling unsustainable economies and ways of living. Or stated more positively, how marketers can get on the right side of sustainability.
Ridding the world of greenwashing would be welcomed progress. Harnessing the creative and persuasive talents of every marketer on behalf of a sustainable world would be nothing short of awesome.