Soft drinks and presidential candidates

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Someone asked me to describe the “positioning” of the three candidates in the race for the White House. Were we facing tough choices between the first possible Black president, the first potential woman in the White House, and an “veteran” candidate?

I tried to explain how while their positioning is blurred, they were good studies of branding. Their cross-over ideologies and mutual respect for one another (Clinton’s not in this camp) make them less a Coke vs Pepsi, and more like Mountain Dew vs Red Bull –which are now called “functional soft drinks.” Yes, McCain exhibits exhibits characteristics of an energy drink, with functional benefits. His packaging is very strong, and his positioning is very shrewd.

On the beverage side, all this election interest has not escaped Mountain Dew, which is holding its own “Dew-mocracy” to find the elixir of freedom.

As for Red Bull, WIRED’s (What’s Inside) analysis of Taurine, an elixir, called it a mild sedative, an age-defying antioxidant with “the potential to steady irregular heartbeats.”

Sounds like Obama?

Cameras kill participation

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The pastor at a church in Pinetop, Arizona made a point that got me rethinking the role of photography. “Like the Pueblos and the Navajos ask,” he said, “come in and join us, don’t observe us…please no photography.”

I’ve been into photography for a long time. At conferences, weddings and children’s school events I switch between participation and observation, making an effort to blend in and be as non intrusive as possible. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself that I could make the switch.

Photo journalists face another part of this join-us-don’t-observe-us dilemma when covering events: should they stop what they came to do and get involved, or stand back and be objective? Through their lens, they see monks getting tear gassed, accident victims traumatized, children fleeing attacks, and natural disasters. Often see journalists among the first responders. Minutes after Nik Ut captured the Pulitzer prize winning photograph of children fleeing a North Vietnam attack on a village, he and another journalist poured water from their canteens on the burned child. He then drove her to hospital.

Where does the word “engagement” stack up in this line of work? Read this story and you will realize it’s not a black and white issue. Marc Halevi of the Eagle-Tribune went to cover a rescue on Plum Island. He first saw the took pictures of a woman on a sand bank of the stormy ocean. “Seconds later as he was looking through his viewfinder, he saw a wave crash against the embankment on which she was standing, knocking down the sand and pulling the woman into the water.” So he did what any photographer would do. He clicked. He also shouted to the rescuers on the scene. “Rather than do it myself,” said Halevi, “I just made this immediate decision that (these people) would be better than I (at rescuing her).”

Participation or Observation?

Fluffing things up, bad for the three R’s

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Reputation. Reasoning. Responses. Our writing has a huge influence on them.

I am working on an article about the ‘fluff’ that creeps into resumes, and why the format is in need of an overhaul. I came across this quote in Writer’s Digest: “Unless you’re doing laundry, you’re not allowed to fluff.”

To which I would like to add:

  • Unless you’re calling in to the Rush Limbaugh show, you’re not allowed to use circumlocutory arguments.
  • Unless you’re wordsmithing legal copy for the back of a cholesterol-reducing drug ad, you’re not allowed to write long, entangled sentences which provoke zero emotional response.

Quotes for the week ending 5 April, 2008

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“So why not bridge the gap between reader interest ad reader engagement by adding SMS codes, 2D barcodes, coupon codes and keyword search?”

Copy in Google ad about the value of adding encoded 2D bar codes (left) in newspaper ads that could be photographed with a mobile phone, and link reader to a virtual bookmark.

“During the inadequate training days prior to the opening, any staff questions were bounced back with ‘I don’t know’ “

British Airways baggage handler, quoted on BBC, about the chaos in Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

“Between information overload, globalization, and the sheer complexity of modern business, we’ve got to be more visual and less language dependent in communicating ideas.”

Dan Roam, visual consultant and author of The back of the napkin.

“Virgle”

Google’s April Fool’s joke (complete with maps and a Press Release) about Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin enabling users to colonize Mars.

“Simultaneity of input.”

Mark Vacay, director of the architecture firm, SmithGroup, on the need for builders to take into account the Millennial generation’s use of space, and using electronics for multiple inputs and interaction.

Should web brands reflect the mother ship?

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Lots of discussion around the new AZCentral web site. It’s a discussion around whether the new site reflects the newspaper brand. It doesn’t, and I wondered if that was accident or intentional heresy. Take a look at AZCentral. If you’re in Arizona, you probably remember the cluttered site that bore no resemblance to the newspaper it was an extension of — The Arizona Republic.

We all worry about two things when it comes to online presence: Usability and Branding. Often we get all fired up over the latter, and pay lip service to the former.

The rhetorical question I often ask is, does an online product need to reflect the branding of the mothership? And often the answer is, “Yes of course!” But if we probe a bit deeper, we may find that the audience for the online product may be looking for a different experience than the audience of the physical product. Even if some part of the audience patronizes both. Do users walk away from an online experience because it is different from the physical entity? Will a McDonald‘s user walk away from the site because there is no giant golden arch on the landing page? The McDonald’s.com site is quite plain in comparison to the physical store. Mcdonald’s USA on the other hand is a lot more interactive than its mothership.

If we design web sites based on who our users are, and how they visit us, maybe our online brand deserves its own identity. Ikea is one huge confusing place that encourages people to get lost, and find plants and window drapes when they only came in to buy a ice bucket. But the Ikea site is organized by the way people search, not the way store customers go to get lost. There are just seven tabs for seven rooms, and one more for three others. It’s that simple. The store is supposed to slow down customers. The site is supposed to speed things up. Usability took home the trophy, for a good reason.

New marketing in a rip, mix, burn culture

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I read a quote somewhere that “mashups are an inalienable right.” To which we could add: Personalization, instant gratification, live streaming, and on-demand are inalienable rights, too.

So we have to expect more of the rip, mix burn possibilities (rip, remix, burn?) as in this latest attempt by Oxford rock band, Radiohead to let its fans remix their own versions of a song, giving them the five elements of the track.

In December last year, Thom Yorke of Radiohead told WIRED, that their “pay what you can” experiment for the album In Rainbows was not a business model but “a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do?” No one quite believed them, as it seemed more like a pilot study for some savvy marketing.

This latest tactic is definitely more than a “response” –a strategy to build a fan base among users who have been weaned on the above-mentioned inalienable rights.

Last chance to register for the Shel Holtz Seminar!

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How do we keep up with the explosion of new social media tools?

Do you feel slightly behind the curve? You’re not alone. And that curve, is more like …a wave, right? IABC Phoenix is bringing in Shel Holtz, blogger, podcaster and technology guru for half-day seminar on social media specially tailored for communicators.

It is designed to help you determine what tools are worth your attention based on your organization’s objectives.

It’s next Tuesday, April 8th. Register here.

Rapp Collins’ web site intrigues, disrupts

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Just like Rapp Collins’ (greatfnplace.com) scrambled ad I wrote about, their web site is meant to disturb. In a good way, perhaps.

Take a look. You can’t scroll via conventional scroll bars. Graphics are almost wacky: cables, birds, mobile phones, Bluetoooth devices, ink blots and web cams beg you to click and interact. But in the end, you feel deprived of content. Deliberately? Who knows. Is this the secret of direct marketing -information underloading for a change?

Apart from the business it is after, it makes you rethink what an online experience could be instead of the boring ‘about’ pages and ‘vision statements’ that are cues for making a hasty retreat.

The only thing that bothers me about the design elements are the wires. As`in cables. Intertwined, and enhanced by Flash, they cleverly mimic DNA strands (thus eliminating the need for pathetic copy that “digital is our DNA…” etc). But in a rapidly unwired Comsumerscape, these USB and Cat-5 cables will soon be as quaint as, floppy drives.

Easy fix, that. Disrupt once more.

Visualizing intangibles, a huge marketing opportunity

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

We writers tend to think that anything can be explained away with a sentence, a headline, a turn of phrase.

But I am also a huge believer in information graphics and icons. Often a few lines with a Sharpie on the back of a napkin can tell a story much, much better than a few PowerPoint slides. Or an ad. (seen the napkin visual in a Saleforce.com ad?) The downside to this is I have a growing collection of napkins from coffee shops and restaurants.

I picked up a brilliant book that deals with just this –throwing light on complex problems using pictures– called The back of the napkin by Dan Roam. “The best way to see something that isn’t there,” says Roam,” “is to look with your eyes closed.”

Visual thinking is the more intuitive way to understand and crack problems, he says. Couldn’t agree more, being (or in spite of being) a writer. That’s why we still need white boards, Visio, and of course napkins.

On a larger scale I see visualization at work everyday when dealing with intangibles –essentially data– involving complex issues such as epidemiology, environment, performance figures, underground water etc. And the trick is to put visualization at the service of problem-solving and make people “see with their eyes closed.”

Marketers have not tapped into this type of mapping, visualizing and problem-solving. Their ‘maps’ are still connected at the hip to org charts, flow diagrams, spread sheets and supply-chain matrices. The intangibles tend to get lost in the forest of data. When you learn to visualize intangibles, a whole new world opens up.

Citizen Op-Ed writers enlarge Spitzer story

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Lorenzo Sierra has a great theory. He may not have hyped it enough, but it’s worth a considering. It’s called the “cyclone of influence.” It has a neat way of explaining, in communication terms, the ever widening circle of influence. It’s very different from the ripple metaphor, he explains. Nor can the cyclone concept be illustrated by your typical PowerPoint icon. It almost requires a 3D perspective spinning and moving in unpredictable paths in real time.

Communication, like some climatic events, are triggered by deliberate or inadvertent human events. The recent Elliot Spitzer cyclone was whipped up in a high pressure area we call infidelity. You could track the scandal on Twitter, as the digital cyclone moved outward, aided by not just gossip publishers, and talk show rants but citizen op-ed writers. People, who were not your typical pundits, were enhancing the story with 140-character Op-eds.

One Michael Parekh wrote: “apparently, Paterson, the likely successor to Spitzer is also a Clinton super-delegate, though apparently not as committed.” Another wrote: Eliot Spitzer is getting Googled today from all over. 10 of the 11 big movers deal with him.

There were those outraged, some funny, and others with insider information like this and this that even journalists covering (enlarging) the event would have appreciated.

Which brings me back to the cyclone concept. Whether the news has the elements (sex scandal, politically incorrect speech, money…) that make it spiral, or is simply hyped by people on a slow news-tweet day, the op-ed factor broadens its footprint. Better get used to it. Especially so if you’re someone who blasts The Media (“Media content has gotten more graphic … “) as Spitzer did.