What the Heck is That? Part 2

Once again, I present you with an image that defies comprehension.

I’m fairly certain it’s supposed to be some sort of animal.  Beyond that, I’m going on pure speculation.  I first thought “rabbit,” but the tail is wrong.  Then “dinosaur with mouth open facing backwards,” but that doesn’t explain the pointy thing sticking out of its belly.

Let’s try seeing it in context.  It’s part of the logo for MacDonald Auto Source.  So perhaps it represents and animal that is fast like a cheetah or reliable like an elephant.  No, neither of those work.  After having given it serious thought (seriously), I think it is a kangaroo.  The tail and rear legs are right, and the two things extending to the left from its head could be very large ears.  The three protuberances on the right might be, from the top, a long, narrow face/snout; two front legs; and a pouch either gaping open or with a pointy joey’s head sticking out.  Let’s go with that theory.

Now the trouble is to try and explain why an automobile dealership would want to associate itself with a mammal that is not exactly the model of smooth, elegant transportation.  “We hop to your service.”?

I think I might make a habit of ridiculing strange or stupid logos.  It doesn’t take much effort, and it guarantees me a steady stream of W titles.

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Washing Dishes

No time for a real post today – slammed at work.  But I saw a TV ad last night that made me wonder: Electrasol (the dishwasher detergent) is changing its name to “Finish.”  So if you go to http://www.electrasol.com, you get an Electrasol welcome screen.  But once you enter, BAM! – you’re in “Finish” land.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no big proponent of the importance of “branding,” but why the heck would you take a name with decades of equity and ditch it?  Any ideas?

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Weather Permitting…

As happens frequently, the Weather Network was completely wrong about predicting the weather even 6 hours in advance last night.  I find it hilarious that they have a 2 week outlook when they can’t even do 2 days.  Actually, to give them credit, I tend to have a medium degree (get it?) of confidence in their 2 day predictions, but anything past that is flipping a coin.

Of course, it’s not their fault.  Weather is a hugely complicated phenomenon with trillions of influences affecting what conditions will be at any given place at any given time.  The more things that are in play, the less predictable something is.  So the rising of the sun tomorrow, with only one influence acting on it (gravity) is as close to 100% predictable as you can get.  The path of a billiard ball has only 3 or four influences, so it is highly predictable.  The airspeed velocity* of an unladen African Swallow has many dozens of influences, so it’s somewhat  predictable.

The point of all this is that the market in general, and whom you market to in particular, have millions of influences.  So it’s very unpredictable.  Sometimes it’s possible to grasp why things happened in hindsight, but it’s impossible to predict the future almost all the time.

So, given this unpredictability, there are two strategies to succeed: you can design your company and yourself to be as agile and reactive as possible to what the future brings; or you can try to create  your own future.  I’m not sure which is better, or which is easier, but the latter is definitely scarier.

* I know “airspeed velocity” is redundant, but one must not misquote Monty Python.

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War on Drugs

This is an interesting British anti-cocaine ad featuring a dead dog as narrator.  Need I say more?

Notice that in order to get through all the clutter and reach their target audience, they had to make this message both funny AND scary.  That’s the nature of interruption marketing.

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What the Heck is That?

Everyone look at the image to the right and take a guess as to what it is.   Medical instrument?  Medieval torture device?  Map of the first few metres of the yellow brick road?

No?  Well maybe seeing it in context would help: click here.

Still not sure?  By now, some New Brunswickers may have figured it out, but for the rest of you, I’ll end the suspense: it’s a fiddlehead.

Fiddleheads are very young ferns that are just starting to unroll.  They are considered a culinary delicacy here in New Brunswick*, and people gleefully tromp out into boggy forests every spring to pick them.  They are steamed or fried or sometimes (shudder) boiled, and served with butter and lemon.   You can read more about them, and see pictures of what they ACTUALLY look like, here.

They are being used as part of a NB Tourism plan to designate certain scenic drives around the province.  To me, this makes about as much sense as writing our highway exit signs in Farsi.  I can hear the conversation now:

Texan tourist to tourism employee:  “Where would ah go to git a look at that there Bay o Fundy ah hear so much about?

Tourism employee, brightly:  “Just follow the fiddlehead signs, sir!”

TT:  “The WHAT?”

TE: “The fiddlehead signs.  The signs with the fiddleheads on them!”

TT: “What the goldarn heck is a fiddlehead?”

TE:  “It’s a young fern, sir.  We eat them.  They look like the ends of violins, (sheepishly) …kind of.”

TT:  “Now yer jist pullin mah leg.”

TE: “No, honest!”

TT: ”OK, Ah’ll jist look for the sign with the plant that looks like the end of a violin, then.”

TE: “Well, actually, sir, the signs don’t really look like that.  They look like a medieval torture device.”

Hilarity ensues.

Even people who live here are confused.  I don’t know how we expect tourists to figure it out.

* Of course, we also eat seaweed, so…

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West is South

In Montréal, like many cities, the main cross-town streets are divided, somewhere near the current or historical center of the urban area, into “East” and “West”.  This seems like a fairly easy concept to grasp, and should help people get around more easily.  The problem in Montréal is that all of the streets with East and West bits run almost directly North and South.

Consider Sherbrooke St. in this map.  I have not changed the orientation of the image – north is straight up.  You can see that “Rue Sherbrooke E” runs north and that “Rue Sherbrooke O” (Ouest = West) runs south.  Similarly, people talk about the “East End” and the “West Island” when they are actually north and south, respectively.

The reason for this (I presume) is that Montréal is located on an island in the Saint Lawrence River.  The river, over its whole course, tends to flow east into the Atlantic ocean.  But the bit where Montréal is located flows nearly directly north.  Regardless, people think of downstream being east, and vice versa.

I don’t suppose this mattered much for the last 300 years, but now, many cars have electronic compasses or GPS guides in them.  How is that going to work?  Will tourists be freaked out when their navigation system tells them, “Turn north onto Sherbrooke St. East.”?

I like quirky things like this, and I think they can be huge marketing advantages.  Every bar should have something slightly off-kilter – something remarkable – to set it apart.

P.S. Also on this map is Île Sainte-Hélène, where the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is located.  That is where there will NOT be an F1 race this summer.  Sorry, Netdud.

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Wine Appreciation Redux

Aha!  Once again it has been experimentally proven that the majority of people actually prefer  less expensive wine to pricier vino, when they don’t know the price.  BUT, when they do  know the price, they prefer the more expensive plonk, and not only consciously, but physiologically, too.  The study about negative correlation between price and preference is here, and the one that shows we are physically  affected by knowing the price of something is here.

There are three important lessons here:

1. I am a genius, because I wrote about this months ago.

2. People value your product or service based at least partially on how much it costs.  Otherwise, the maxim “you get what you pay for,” would have never been born.  Interestingly, though, this is only true in the “real” world: less expensive things are viewed as lower quality, and “free” things with outright distrust.  On the internet, though, where “things” are actually just bits and bytes, “free” is becoming the expectation.  But that’s a whole other discussion.

3. Marketing affects people physically.  Isn’t that a little freaky?  That what you communicate to people can actually change the way their brain functions? 

Scott Adams writes frequently at his blog about how we are all “moist robots,” preprogrammed to react in a certain way to any given situation, and that no-one really has “free will.”  This would tend to support his argument – the fact that if you are convinced something is better, you will enjoy it more, whether it really is better or not.

Of course, the key word there is “convinced.”  If I simply tell you, “You will prefer this wine,” then the brain effect probably wouldn’t happen, because you may doubt my motives or expertise.  But an unbiased  indicator, like the free-market value of a particular wine, will sway your neurons.

So what does that mean for marketing?  That telling people things is nowhere near as effective as letting them find about by themselves.  That’s a hard concept for someone raised to think of “marketing” and “advertising” as meaning the same thing, but it’s the new reality.

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When I was a child…

…we were taught that the noble Canadian icon, the beaver, was the only animal other than man that shaped its own environment.  They build damns to create  headponds in which to construct their lodges.  The lodges themselves are ingenious structures, keeping them warm through the winter and safe from predators.  I believe beavers were referred to in my education as “nature’s engineers.”

Well I don’t know if they’re all that and a bag of chips.  But there is something to be said for creating  a playing field that is tilted in your favour.

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Whiskey on the Go-Go

 A few weeks ago, 4 families on our street with similarly-aged daughters all went Christmas Tree hunting.  For those of you have have never performed this winter ritual, it involves driving out into the country to a Xmas Tree farm (if you’re the law-abiding sort), walking deep into the property to where the best trees are, wandering around in the snow for a while until you find the perfect  tree, then cutting it down with a bucksaw and dragging it back out.

 Depending on the weather and snow depth, it can be chilly work.  So another part of the tradition is to bring along a little something to warm one’s cockles, if you know what I mean.  On this trip, one of the ladies brought along a small bottle of “Fireball.”  It’s basically a liqueur-strength treatment of Canadian Rye Whiskey heavily flavoured with cinnamon and pepper.  It’s lower alcohol content means that even unhardened drinkers can take it straight, and then get a hot rush of spiciness followed by a slight burn from the whiskey.  So it does feel like it’s actually warming you up – perfect for out in the cold.

Kim, who requested a photo credit

The key word there is “out” – one of the ladies (Kim) observed that she could not remember ever drinking Fireball from a glass; only ever straight from the bottle.  It’s almost always consumed outside, where glasses are scarce.  We went on to wonder what sort of glass one would even serve it in, so they asked me, the ex-bartender.  I replied that nothing like it existed when I was bartending, but the closest thing, peppermint schnapps, was almost always served as part of a shooter.

Fireball is the same as all the not-quite 40% alcohol-by-volume liquors like Jagermeister that have been invented in the last 20 years to get kids drunk faster.  I think the marketing idea went something like this:  “OK, for 20 years (1970 – 1990), we got kids drunk by selling them ”shooters”, which had enough alcohol to seem daring, but were still drinkable by newbies because you didn’t really taste the alcohol, and it was reduced from full strength by the addition of juice or lower-octane liqueurs. (E.g. the grandpa of all shooters, the B-52, is made from Grand Marnier (40%), Baileys Irish Cream (17%), and Kahlua (26%).)  Then the kids started wanting something even more risqué – something “straight.”  So we gave them 33% strength booze, and made it taste like candy.”

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Wacky Dream

A few nights ago, I had a dream.  I was in some kind of resort community very much like St. Andrews.  There were a large group of elderly (but spry and kindly) women visiting from some far-away place.  There were hundreds of them, all over town.

Every time they received a service from someone – a doorman, a taxi driver, a store clerk, a waiter, whatever – they would very primly press two coins (always a dime and a nickel) into that person’s palm.

In my dream, I realized what was happening: some tour guide or other source of information had told them that it was customary in this resort to tip service staff 15%, but they, as a group, had understood 15¢.  Cents.

So the tourists thought they were being very thoughtful by remembering to observe the local tradition, and the service personnel thought they were cheap hags who could go to hell for all they cared.  If the ladies knew the truth, they would be horrified at what they had been doing and would immediately rectify their behaviour.  If the servers knew that the ladies were misinformed, they would probably feel less slighted, and would probably gently set them straight.

But in my dream this never happened.  This sort of misunderstanding drives me crazy.  It’s why I hate romantic comedies; where 75% of the time the problem is that the couple in question each thinks that the other doesn’t want to be together for some reason, when in fact they both do.

Why is it we’re sometimes afraid to tell people the TRUTH?  To (always) make it clear what our expectations are, and what we’re prepared to do in exchange?  In most cases, expecially in business, this isn’t a problem.  When I walk into a store, I have a clear expectation that I will give them money and receive some good or service in return.

But it’s not always so cut and dried.  When an employee is doing something incorrectly, and the manager thinks, “I’ll just let that slide – I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” then the manager is doing no-one any good.  The quality of the work is compromised, and the employee would probably want to know how to perform properly.  Why is telling the truth so hard in this case?

I think we as marketers have to bear this in mind.  Our customers might be too polite to tell us we’re doing stuff wrong.  Sometimes, customer feedback is loud and clear, like when Rogers tried to charge an arm and a leg for iPhone plans.  But we may be doing things that prevent our customers from being perfectly satisfied, or maybe even outright irritating them; and not know it.

So what’s the answer?  Intimate knowledge of your target market.  Be so aware of their wants/needs/desires that you can actually anticipate them, rather than react to them.  This is a very difficult thing to do, but it is getting easier with people putting more and more of themselves out there on social networks for their “friends” to see.  Why can’t you  be their friend?

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