Want some http://co.ke/tonite?
If you're investing in sending out a high volume of tweets for yourself or your company -- and you happen to possess a fairly rabid fan base -- it would be interesting to explore if you'd receive more click-throughs to your tweets as a result of vanity short URLs.
Breathtaking.
That's the feeling you get when you see a designed artifact out in the market, whether logo or advertisement or Web site, and you can see right through it to the marketing strategy.
Why would your company put your marketing strategy into plain view?
This post talks about the following rule:
3) Don't pretend to be what you're not. This is the worst hypocrisy.
Anyone remember Pallotta TeamWorks?
It was an experiment in for-profit charitable giving, run by a charismatic, cultish CEO. This Los Angeles-based company produced a roster of events such as the Avon 3-Day Walk for Breast Cancer, the AIDSRide, and many others. Their well-honed marketing and PR machine created an appearance of a vibrant, tight-knit community of people across America that would take part in hardcore athletic activities to raise funding for hot-button medical initiatives that needed research breakthroughs. Their events were well-attended, well-run, and chock full of people who really felt they were making a difference.
I was one of them. I participated in the 2001 Avon 3-Day Walk in Washington, D.C., raising with my wife over $2,000. And at first, the event was a blast. I met a ton of amazing people and really pushed the limits of what I thought was possible for me to physically accomplish.
During the second day of the event, as we lounged in pain around the camp and chowed down on a lackluster spaghetti and tomato sauce, Dan Pallotta gave a speech about what his company wanted to accomplish as a whole. He painted a bold vision of us making a real impact in breast cancer research, complete with jingoistic music swelling up in the background to punctuate his responses. He showed us an events roster for the upcoming year, encapsulated in a gigantic brochure (probably 24" by 12", full color, dozens of pages) that would be mailed to us after the event. He hoped that we would take part in more Pallotta events and keep the flame for their foray into making the impossible possible.
As a marketing professional that had spent the past four years working with nonprofit clients such as American Diabetes Association, I knew that something was very, very wrong. Such a brochure would cost at least $8 to produce and mail -- a move that smacked of complete fiscal irresponsibility. Barring low participation in an event, the highest fraction of every dollar donated should go directly to the associated charity. Where was all this money coming from?
When I returned home from the event, I immediately found a groundswell of citizens and journalists on the Internet that were savaging Pallotta's for-profit basis and event performance. Pallotta's bold experiment was shaped around a mission that put the participant's transcendence of their physical limits (an epic bike ride, a 60-mile walk) before the actual results of those actions for the associated charities. In the AIDSRides, as an example, only 21 cents of every dollar raised went to charity.
When confronted with these numbers, the companies that had hired Pallotta to produce their charitable events immediately fired him. As a result, the company imploded and laid off all 250 of its employees.
If Pallotta TeamWorks was a non-profit enterprise and had carried traditional non-profit values, they might have operated on a shoestring and shown real results. Their core values were at cross-purposes with the core values of what charitable giving should be: a selfless sacrifice for a just reward. Their core audience of hardcore exercise do-gooders saw straight through their marketing hype and personal empowerment doublespeak into their lack of sacrifice.
This leads to the only corollary of the third law:
No matter where your company exists, it is a world citizen. Behave like one by giving back thoughtfully and not being voraciously greedy.
Pallotta created their own little world and ignored the big picture. People think about companies and brands like they think about people. They have a face and a voice and a history. Yes, they still need to bring in revenue. Just make sure you do so in a way that is mindful of your impact on the community and the context in which you create your gains, and be prepared to give some of it away in exchange for greater respect.
It sounds so easy in theory. But in practice, this is where almost every company falters. No matter how many contests you hold to encourage green citizenship or how much money you invest in promoting your investment in social responsibility, people will only ask why it took so long for you to get started. This leads me to my final corollary:
It's best to invest in social responsibility without promoting it. Unless you can create a legacy.
Unless you're Patagonia or TerraPass or any of a list of companies that have centered their entire business practice and brand strategy around sustainability, consider making incremental change without viewing each action as a marketing opportunity. Wait until there's a holistic story to tell that doesn't smack of opportunism.
Here's a good example. Within a period of months, Tully's Coffee switched their espresso to organic/Fair Trade, brought composting into all their stores, changed the engineering of their materials to make them compostable, and began bringing local/organic baked goods to support their coffees. By creating a legacy with their business choices across the board, they changed their stance in the market and even made Starbucks look a little weak in the knees. At least, until Starbucks fought back. What I find really interesting is that Tully's never heavily promoted the switch on their Web site... And didn't want to acknowledge the articles floating around regarding how Fair Trade is actually retarding the process of bringing better coffee on the global market?
Yet again, every step forward for social responsibility is on a slippery slope. I applaud companies like Tully's that are looking to renovate their business model, realizing that it's one of the only ways towards true sustainability and being responsible for their actions on society at large.
In my last post in this series, I'll talk about ways to approach spending money on marketing social responsibility, if you must...
Read Part 1. This new post talks about the following rule:
2) Don't have anything to hide. It just makes for more hypocrisy.
Have you ever taken a trip to the fine city of Energyville?
Chevron has taken it upon themselves to design a game that shows just how hard it is to keep electricity flowing to the nation's cities without traditional fossil fuels in the mix. And you know what? They're completely right. It would be hypocritical of me to think that within the next two weeks, let alone ten years, we're going to be able to generate enough energy from alternative energy sources to create a major offset of fossil fuels in the United States to power our cities, cars, and planes.
That said, Chevron is hypocritical to think that a simple game modeled off Sim City and designed for smarty-pants liberals who listen to NPR and wear corduroy is going to change my impression of their company and business model. Yes, they have invested billions over the past half-decade into alternative energy sources--but I know that's a mere fraction of the profit they've been raking in from this multi-year spike in oil prices. It is not in their corporate interest to shift from their main source of revenue (oil) to envisioning a future tied up in alternative energy sources. They have to keep the pumps running, putting out other fires, and paying out those serious dividend checks.
For the American populace and the Democratic government, Chevron has an infinite distance to travel to be seen as a good citizen. It was never part of the core DNA of the Chevron brand to be promoting "Human Energy" -- that was an evolution required by a hardcore assault by the Democratic government that's just the tip of the iceberg. Chevron's "Will You Join Us?" microsite is just an attempt to soften the blow of reality and make the public aware of just how morally fraught their position is. For those who don't see the whole picture, they have succeed, but at what cost? Chevron is part of a web of hypocrisy contingent on real change across multiple industries. Every time they report record profits for their shareholders, they look more like a hypocrite.
So, how can Chevron escape out of this marketing death spiral?
By following this corollary to the second law:
Humility and honesty is the only antidote to hypocrisy.
Not in a clever video game, mind you -- humility in a company-wide acknowledgment of the real impact oil has on the world at large and the direct steps they're going to take over the next 50 years to evolve their business out of oil and force other industries, such as car and airplane manufacturers, to focus their energy on alternative fuel sources. Articulate who you want to be without oil and people will respect you for your honesty and vision -- plus, you'll make more impact than all the companies like TerraPass that are trying to aggregate people's individual contributions into a motivator for real change. That would be a reflection of a true commitment to sustainability.
A similar strategy to Chevron has recently been taken by Chevrolet to focus on how they're developing a range of fuel solutions for their vehicles. This kind of marketing is just primed for a backlash, however, as it doesn't show true humility about how they'd like to get into the zero-pollution game with all of their car lines. And if Chevrolet doesn't pay off their vision with measurable results, they will always be seen as the villain. And it doesn't help that their primary ad image when this campaign broke was a boy hugging a tree. Um, right.
It'd be easier for Chevron and Chevrolet to spin off their green businesses, get them successful, then fold their old, tainted brands out of business than to reinvent their brands as they exist today.
Maybe I'm the one being naive... but it seems from this flurry of marketing activity, the oil game can't change unless you get out of oil. The whole position of "Saying No to No" that I saw in a recent Shell ad (that ripped off a photo that was on the cover of the CommArts photo annual and the New York Times Magazine) is saying to avoid being hypocritical. That's even more meaningful coming from an oil company, right?
It's difficult to work in marketing and live without illusions. Hypocrisy is something you can't escape when you sell a product or service. There is no perfect marketing message.
Unlike public relations, which can veer from great journalism to thinly disguised product placement, marketing doesn't claim to holiness. You're telling other people to focus their attention on a single element of a complicated product or service, all the while attempting to differentiate your client from their peers.
No wonder people equate lawyers with advertising professionals at the bottom of the professional food chain. Both of them deal in arbitrary versions of the truth, contested and argued before a court of your peers. At least salespeople get to have a conversation with their clients, while marketers often inject static messaging into the world at large, hoping that their audience aligns their loyalties with your line of thinking.
When you look at your marketing message in this way, I think it becomes evident why it's so hard for companies to market charitable initiatives, present themselves as socially responsible through mass media, or demonstrate true concern about environmental change. You're asking people to look you in the eye and perhaps smile, but they can't help but focus on the spot of blood on your cheek, trickling slowly towards the ground...
With this in mind, I'd like to propose the following three laws regarding the pitfalls of marketing your corporation's social responsibility. And at the end of this series, I'll provide guidelines that companies can follow to minimize the amount of perceived hypocrisy your social responsibility marketing can have on your brand -- and so you don't end up as a social offsetter like CITGO.
This post talks about the following rule:
1) You can't market social responsibility without an ounce of hypocrisy.
CREDO Mobile (formerly Working Assets Wireless) gives 1% of all wireless fees to liberal charities and organizations, straight off the top. Over they past 23 years, they've given $50 million to charity. Sounds great on paper. Looks good in the ads. Makes you feel like you're part of something bigger. Keeps you in your tribe of like-minded friends.
And if I do the math correctly, that is approx. $5 billion in aggregated revenue for Working Assets. So... why don't you just give that $50 million straight to the charities involved and use AT&T? Over the past 60 years, AT&T has donated $1.6 billion dollars (and counting) to social causes from their foundation. Sure, I don't have control over where AT&T donates their money. $1.6 billion is a micro-fraction of the many gazillions AT&T has made over the years. And I know they're getting a big tax break from their foundation revenue. With that in mind, I'm going to stick with their cell-phone service and go write a big check to the ACLU.
I love the idea behind CREDO Mobile and hope that they have continued success. But I can already hear the meetings cranking up in the AT&T corporate offices about how to cut off CREDO at the pass and crush them with their own big charitable digits. Every little bit counts, but if you've got lots of big bits, you have a better story.
This leads to a corollary to the first law of marketing social responsibility:
Context overrules substance. Your audience and competition will always have a counter-argument to your marketing position.
No matter how much you donate to a charity or how much you reinvent your business model to be more socially responsible, be aware of the context of change.
Change in the realm of social responsibility is incremental and somewhat arbitrary. You can never do enough to manifest real impact. It can only be aggregated over time and eventually quantified on a fiscal basis. Unlike marketing the benefits of a product such as a cell phone, which can be itemized and positioned against similar benefits of your competitor's phones, social responsibility has no parity other than how much you donate and who it goes to. Equality between charities is morally relative -- one person's National Rifle Association is another person's American Cancer Society.
Now, another corollary:
The risk of hypocrisy increases as social responsibility increases.
Take, as a recent example, the TerraPass.
Carbon offsetting is the rage in social responsibility. The TerraPass has gained a lion's share of press in the market, promoting offsetting as well as behavioral change as key ways to make a difference in the environment and help reduce global warming.
According to the ticker at the bottom of their website, they've helped 75,000 individuals and businesses offset 708,573,072 pounds of carbon emissions. That made me feel warm and fuzzy, because those numbers show that they've made a tangible difference. Their site does a bang-up job of describing the ways that you can participate without veering into preachy territory. It made me comfortable to give it a shot.
So, where's the hypocrisy in the TerraPass? It's hard to sniff out, but I'll take a stab:
They're selling the future. And the future is a hard product to offer, because it may never materialize in the bright, glossy, natural form that we imagine. (Yes, I have read The World Without Us. That isn't likely to happen... yet.)
I went and reviewed the Executive Summary of the EPA's summary report on Greenhouse Gases. It said that there were 6,089.5 teragrams of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere in 2005. Needless to say, as I did the math my warm fuzzies rapidly evaporated under the hot sun of those statistics.
A much, much greater quantity of people -- an order of magnitude greater -- needs to participate in the TerraPass program and others like it before any real change occurs. We're so far in the hole on carbon emissions that it can seem a Sisyphean task to recover.
With regards to carbon offsetting: you can market the benefit, but the only tangible is how you feel after you've written your check and the knowledge that sometime in the future, the needle will swing one micron in the right direction. (And this seems like a silly little point, but here goes: they started with a team from a university, but are now a corporation. As a nonprofit, they may have been able to administrate their efforts more affordably and sink their excess revenue into more projects. On the other hand, as a for-profit corporation, things can get a heck more nimble and there's usually less politics about the whole enterprise.)
The TerraPass vision? 10 billion pounds of carbon offset and a million people participating in their program. What's wrong with that? Not much, unless those billions are amortized over, say, 25 years. Using the above math, and assuming the carbon output of the U.S. is stable, we won't have made that much of a dent. Why not just browbeat the oil companies through legislation into speeding up their development of alternative energy sources? Reduce plastics use and replace with alternative, biodegradable resources? There's always a faster way, with the right money and resources, to go further. Oi.
This is a third corollary of the first law:
A better charitable decision can always be rationalized by your audience. Be prepared for it. Roll with it. Consider using it.
I love the TerraPass and will be using it when I take plane flights. But I have no illusions that I'll perceive a demonstrable, positive climate change in my lifetime from their efforts. And there's no way TerraPass can be a success if they come out of the gate with that kind of truth. Sorry, Al Gore, but here's how I'm reducing my carbon footprint: I'm not having kids. What kind of special bonus credit do I get for that?
Sell now, reap the reward now, ignore the consequences later. This strategy is social offsetting. This strategy is an all too common parlance in today's advertising world.
The work can be socially responsible, but not sustainable. It can be meticulously researched, but not insightful. It can be extraordinarily gorgeous in its production values, but vapid. It can illuminate deep investment in local communities, only matched by the vast sums lavished on advertising said investments for brand lift.
A recent example is a brand advertising campaign currently running for CITGO. It's a perfect example of social offsetting -- focusing on the positive impact on local community, making an investment in social responsibility on a day-to-day basis, all the while ignoring the long-term expense owed to the world at large regarding the product that they sell.
Social Offsetting is a Risky Maneuver
Why is it that our oil industry, which is one of the most profitable corporate ventures in today's economy, is wasting gallons of money on incredibly dumb advertising instead of investing in our increased independence from petroleum products? This is a rhetorical question. We know the answer: employees, shareholders, political stakeholders, and franchises. Incremental profits and dividends. Short-term and long-term gains.
The greenwashing race has been on since the heady days of the BP rebrand, and long enough for the inevitable backlash to crash down on unsuspecting corporations, drag them through the muck, and gracefully recede to leave their gasping corpses on the beach for all to see. Gracefully rich corpses, mind you.
What concerns me now, however, is that oil companies with little or no "green story" are pouring money and thought into tastefully executed ad campaigns that attempt to either immunize customers from the increased hypocrisy regarding oil use in America, or shift our focus onto immediate human needs and turn a somewhat blind eye towards the future impact of the use of their products.
Looking at these dumb ads can be like reading a terrible creative brief. Take the ad which I've included here from CITGO.
Imagined creative brief: Companies such as Chevron are touting figures that point to their investment in alternative energy. Customers are angrier than ever about rising gas costs. How can we increase brand lift for Citgo and potentially increase consumption of our gasoline without a strong social responsibility/alternative fuels message?
Solution: Let's focus on the human condition. Let's make it personal. It's more important than ever to foster brand loyalty towards a specific brand of gas, since it's pumped by a local gas station near your home. It's not about the price of the gas. It's about supporting local business and communities and the jobs in this unstable economy that are preserved. It's about the people who man the pumps.
This position would be fabulous... if it really meant anything. By reading the copy in this ad, I learned a number of things, but none of them created a real point of differentiation against other gas stations, or other local franchises, for that matter.
This well-designed, well-executed ad has only served the purpose of making CITGO look like a company that doesn't give a damn about the long-term effects of their products on society. The sale of their products benefits the owners of their franchises and their shareholders. Bully to them. But it isn't sustainable. It doesn't hold up against their competition, who are hammering on sustainability hard. CITGO just looks like they're being facile. And it never helps when the guy who owns your business also happens to be a head of state that loves to hammer on George W. Bush (which we Democrats do anyways, but we usually aren't hanging out with Fidel Castro).
As we follow this logic:
CITGO thinks we all believe oil companies (may) own our corner gas stations, and the employees that work there are shills for the man. Just like at 7-11. And McDonalds. In fact, they assume we don't know that many major corporations that sell products sourced globally are franchises or licensees. Which would make CITGO just like pretty much any other corporation that sells a parity product. They have to franchise them. They don't want to dirty their hands with the actual effort managing thousands of local retail locations would require, including becoming good local citizens on the ground level.
Since the oil industry is doing so well, it's helping to keep people employed and prosperous in a down economy. This is the same case for any scarce resource, and while we haven't reached peak oil yet, they're in the business of putting us all out of business. Again, the short-term view rears its head.
These employees have money to support local communities, since they're doing so well. Ah... just cause they're doing well doesn't mean they're supporting local communities. Don't assume that everyone that owns a CITGO station is a good samaritan, unless it's required as part of their corporate charter (which I wouldn't be surprised if it was.) But this is a small point. You're still selling gas. Are you really being telling me something in this ad I didn't know already?
What really gets my goat, however, is that I spotted the CITGO ad in Harper's, where you practically need a Master's Degree to read some of the book reviews. These well-educated readers are going to see this ad, think about it for two minutes, and shred it with their intellect like a hot knife through Earth Balance buttery spread. Especially since the editors at Harper's have focused on peak oil issues and energy independence as a major topic of interest for some time now. Did your media planner read the magazine before making the buy? Did your media planner think that 97% of Harper's readers would know that CITGO is effectively owned by Hugo Chavez? (Actually, they might score some points there with those wacky Marxist college professors.)
Yes, it helps when you place your dumb ads in magazines where people will recognize just how dumb they are. Now come up with something better that doesn't belittle the real situation we're in.
I'm waiting with bated breath for the ad campaign from McDonald's about how they're supporting local businesses, as well as farms and slaughterhouses, and by extension making the world a better place.
The Right Kind of Transparency
Clearly, if we have cars, we need some kind of fuel. I totally understand that. I have an old Corolla that I drive to client meetings and band practice. I can't be so much of a hypocrite that I can't understand that I'm contributing to the problem. In fact, I'm educated enough to know that if I could reduce this argument to a simple answer, we wouldn't be having it. It's a wicked problem that will take hundreds of years to unravel.
However, I am mindful enough to think of the impact of my driving four miles to work, and try to minimize it by bussing or biking. I am investing time, energy, and attention into ventures that are looking to get us out of the petroleum game, both in making lifestyle choices (such as buying very local foods), in choosing socially responsible investment vehicles, and in having been a vegetarian for 13 years.
And because of this, and because the biodiesel movement is fraught with all sorts of risks and perils, I actually appreciate it when companies such as Chevron point out that they've invested $1B in alternative energy and are attempting to migrate their business into that as a long term venture. $1B is a drop in the bucket compared to their profit margin last year, and their marketing has its own hypocrisies that piss me off and will be mentioned in a later post. But I appreciate it when they don't skirt around the fact that we need oil now, but are trying to sell me a future with reduced independence. This "putting ourselves out of business" argument holds a lot more weight for people who are mindful about their footprint.
Now, if you've made it this far through this unintentional screed, you're going to be very interested in what follows. (And I should disclose that I wrote all of the above before I went to the CITGO Web site.)
For some reason, CITGO actually pushed to the public not only all of the TV and print ads, but also the media schedules for their ongoing campaign, their top-level market research, their audience segmentation and personas. I think it's pretty rare when a corporation puts live to the viewing public the thinking that supports their advertising at a strategic level. And there's a good reason why we don't expose this thinking to our audience. It makes corporations look ruthless, manipulative, and reductive. In many ways, that summarizes intelligently executed marketing strategy. However, seeing the wizard behind the curtain has a way of making the puppet show look mighty flimsy.
Thanks to CITGO, I know that I fall into the Progressive Activist category when it comes to their marketing. They've created a lovely logo to personify my recycling-junkie ways. They've told me when they'll be reaching me with these ads. They have big plans to educate the masses about their efforts. They've identified the issues of greatest importance to me and my corporate fellows, such as Environmental Stewardship, Local Ownership, and Social Development. Yes, Environmental Stewardship is one of eight pillars of their positioning, but they aren't talking about reducing dependence on oil. After all, it says on their Web site that "gasoline is still cheaper than bottled water" with regard to how much value they can squeeze out of every ounce of crude.
Yes, I'm quoting somewhat verbatim from copy on their Web site.
Yes, it is quite embarrassing to tell your customers on a page advertised on their corporate site exactly how you're going to convince them that you're not all that bad. Then again, look at poor Barkley out of Kansas City. They couldn't stem the PR nightmare and the flood of money that gushed out when 7-Eleven pulled out of working with CITGO in 2,100 stations due to its ties to Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. Even local gas stations are doing the same today. CITGO is clearly looking for a way to purchase themselves out of a rock-bottom brand position with the American public.
And they've continued that downward trend beautifully by showing me just how much they consider me part of their future. CITGO's exposure to the public of their market research and segmentation plans, how they are working to shape my opinions to like them more, and the lengths they want to go to do so in public, bald language, is both arrogant and galling.
Don't tell me how you're going to change my mind to like you more -- especially when you didn't include a Web site URL or other call to action in your ad to find out more information. Clearly, you didn't want me to look. I did. And look what I found: Beautifully designed, tastefully photographed, well-written ads calculated in a gambit to "change perceptions about CITGO among opinion leaders across the country," targeted at influentials like myself.
Guess what. You succeeded. I now have an even lower opinion of CITGO.
And I also have a parting request: Invest your advertising money in something more worthwhile, like these local communities that you love to tell me that you support.
My big advice to Nau 2.0: Charge more for your clothes. And start as small as you can.
A few months ago, I wrote a post on the rise of Indie and Eco Luxury, and one of the hero companies of Eco Luxury that I mentioned was Nau. They were one of the first attempts at creating a luxury brand that forcefully marketed ecological, sustainable, and stylish clothing through online and direct retail stores.
Sadly, due to a lack of venture capital funding Nau was forced to shut their retail stores and sell off all of their stock at a discount. There's been much talk in the blogosphere about what killed Nau v1.0:
Their unusual, I mean novel, retail model. Nau stores generally carried one size of each style and encouraged store visitors to have their purchases shipped to their home instead of buying them in the store. Critics have noted that many luxury fashion purchases are often made on whim, and the inability to easily carry a purchase out could have been a negative for the buying experience. (I personally didn't care when I had made an purchase there, but then again, I'm not really a luxury shopper.)
Their all-Flash Web site. Nau.com, as much as I love it from a branding perspective, was not created in a manner that made it easy to shop and had weak user experience. When the brand launched, some of my designer friends had hammered on the site design as an example of design trumping usability, which is definitely a bad place to be for a design-oriented brand that focuses on function and form.
Their oversized ambition regarding audience demand. Nau's business plan hinged on continued rounds of investor financing to ensure their continued growth into more retail locations. This is what really spiked Nau's ambition, when you boil all of this down. Instead of fostering an audience through their Web site and then growing that online audience into local retail, where demand had been generated, Nau was looking to expand into new locations even as they were discussing shutting their doors. My neighborhood of Fremont in Seattle was the destination for one of those new locations.
I find it fascinating that a company that wanted to live, eat, sleep, and breathe sustainability in clothing production, distribution, and sales practices didn't launch their business by only selling through the Internet, or intentionally limit their market by starting very exclusive before mass-producing their line and attempting to go big retail. Millions of dollars were wasted in proving that without a strong online customer base, a compelling retail experience in a few upscale markets isn't quite enough to keep the doors open.
Had Nau offered a smaller product line that was made to order and was perhaps more exclusive in both price point and retail placement, my gut tells me that they would have organically created a group of loyalists that would have evangelized the brand when they dove into the mainstream retail market as their own storefront.
Small pioneering eco-luxury brands such as Mink Shoes took about as long as Nau's lifespan to get off the ground, and still haven't achieved any major economies of scale. But they're profitable, and resell through many top retailers. A recent article in Fast Company echoes similar sentiment regarding the need to find sustainability through selling small quantities of green products in the luxury market. You won't see Barney's selling 2,000 of the same pair of eco-friendly shoes. Eco Luxury has a long, long way to go if it's going to scale to the mainstream in any meaningful way.
Hindsight is 20/20 here. And luckily, Horny Toad has swooped in and purchased the Nau brand and legacy, along with much of the original staff, to give it another go. Here's hoping that with this new financial backer, Nau 2.0 will be able to create a sustainable business practice through actual clothing sales that matches the deep philosophical roots that underpin their products.
So, back to what I said at the start of all this...
Okay, Nau 2.0: Now that thousands of your loyal customers have jumped up and down and told you how much we want you to stick around, I don't think we'll mind paying a little more for your clothes -- especially if that will allow you to continue donating 5% of each purchase to charity.
If you're going to try and keep the luxury mantle on your products and your philosophy untouched, that's one of the few ways to keep an edge on the dozens of other fashion brands that are now rolling out eco-friendly lines alongside their usual unsustainable practices.
And we'll forgive you for the missteps along the way... just be sure to be a little smarter about what you're doing this time.
When you work as a professional in the area of solving problems for clients, no matter what your discipline, there's rarely a roadblock you run up against that can't be overcome through collective brainpower or sheer brute force.
Most designers would be loath to concede defeat in the face of a client need. We thrive on challenges that require all of our wits to surmount, either by solving a difficult problem with an elegant design solution, or reframing the problem to probe the thinking behind it and come up with a new problem to solve properly. Wrong audience, business, message, media: no problem. Just adjust these dials, push a button or two, and we've recalibrated the machine for maximum throughput. Press "print" or "go live" and all will be well in the state of Designopolis.
Once you start playing with the big corporations, however, you aren't solving simple problems anymore. Instead of digging a hole to plant your tree, you're asked to move a mountain, spoonful by spoonful, to the other side of the bay. And while you're at it, can you raise customer satisfaction in the 24 to 40 age bracket by 20 percent and sell $2 million more of our product line, and pronto? Different goals and needs become tangled together. What you as a designer can control, and what your client controls, become contingent. Insert a wicked problem here, and it'll all go haywire.
Wicked problems. Big, thorny, gnarly problems. The kinds of problems that drive our creative industries to sleepless nights, burning with their own sort of dangerous energy, morphing over time and confounding marketers left and right.
The idea of "wicked problems" was coined by Horst Rittel, a theorist of design and planning and M. Webber. (See the full Wikipedia entry here.) I've copied Rittel and Webber's list of wicked problem criteria here from Wikipedia because they can't really be paraphrased, and while they're related to social policy planning, as you read through this list some previous clients you've worked with and the problems they were trying to solve might bubble to the surface of your mind:
While scientists have been spending years trying to develop various tactics to break down and expound upon wicked problems to derive positive change, we as designers can't easily engage with wicked problems -- that is, without entering into a client-designer relationship without both parties being aware that the problem is wicked and that we can only define success as a specific type of improvement agreed upon by both parties. Without calling out the complexity of a problem before engaging with a client, and being aware that you can't "solve it," you can't easily escape failure. This is why marketing is both an art and a science. You can quantify your goals and your previous actions, but only hope to predict the outcomes of your current and future actions, based on a snapshot of your audience's needs that are fluid, at best.
When I first read this list, a wicked problem for designers seemed to fit these criteria neatly:
Being asked to steer public opinion regarding a complex societal problem to sell a product. Hello, greenwashing. Social responsibility marketing, or any kind of marketing that is hinged on "changing the world for the better," really, is a function of a wicked problem. This is why there's hypocrisy inherent in promoting incremental improvement towards an idealistic goal of reduced environmental impact for, say, a plastics corporation. I could go on and on regarding this subject, but I'll leave it here with the knowledge that my thinking alone won't make a major dent in this problem. Marketing products through social responsibility requires reductive thinking on the part of the marketer and the market, which doesn't always indicate positive change from the requested action on the part of the customer.
The following didn't seem like a wicked problem at first, but it's definitely indicative of some of these criteria and hard to overcome:
Being asked to create belief in a company's actions when the customer's desired experience is never acknolwedged. If you are asked to motivate consumers to act based on a poor product experience, it's going to be an uphill fight. The rules change monthly, if not daily, based on customer behavior prompted by variables you can't control. Designers can't solve these types of problems without systemic change by the client, and can only effect positive change by attempting to foster alignment across all parties in the long term -- and hoping your competitors don't move to entrench their relationships with said audience at the same time. This type of situation requires designers to have discussions with potential clients about doing more than a marketing campaign. It requires a systemic gutting of how that company approaches their customer experience to achieve real success. Otherwise, you're just moving the needle positively in one area while the other ones plummet.
You'll notice that posing any type of positive solution to these wicked problems fall outside the domain of what designers can usually control. And nowadays when a client comes to you, asking for a solution to a problem that can't really be solved, only improved, it usually requires reframing the problem on a grand scale -- reaching your hands into the mechanisms of their organization to point out where the real problems may lie. This can be a scary place for a designer to operate, as it isn't always our core competency. Also, as marketing can be very reductive -- Universal Selling Proposition? Three product pillars in the body copy? -- I would argue that any type of reductive thinking will actually worsen a wicked problem unless it's grounded in a very sophisticated long-term plan that strings together those marketing nibbles into a holistic, long-term pattern that generates meaningful change.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Now that we've worked through some of the key approaches to formulating business, marketing, and tactical strategies for your clients -- and how those form the frame around your creative strategy -- I thought it would be valuable to include a few points about how to distill your marketing insights into compelling creative communications.
Think outside the box, but inside the strategy.
As a designer, there's nothing I love more than launching into space after reading a creative brief, brainstorming solutions for the client's needs. But that brainstorm should never go off into deep space, never to return. I know it's bad etiquette to edit during brainstorms, so I try to let every idea have its due... at first. But when you're culling those ideas down to what will become solid concepts to put in front of the client, you have to be ruthless. Anything that doesn't fit the strategy and the key insight the client approved in the brief, or modifies that insight into something completely fresh and new, needs to be placed in the parking lot and saved for future use. (Unless your brief was wrong in the first place, which means you should back up a few paces and make sure you landed the right insight to back up your creative work.)
Firmly fix your concepts on a properly told story.
You know they want your vacuum cleaner because it has a sexy design, it lives at a slightly lower price point than the competition, and the HEPA filter makes it easy to clean up dog hair. Yawn. Don't tell me the details. Show me how it's going to change my life. Find a story that communicates this seed feeling to me. Then hammer on it mercilessly. Again, if you don't have a story that matches your key insight, you need to step back and rethink where you're at.
Don't move away from a key insight or position too quickly. You might piss off your clients and your audience.
As you develop creative concepts in a series, don't be too hasty to bring in something new. There's a major piss-off factor that happens when you iterate insights about your brand too quickly. It usually just means that you landed on the wrong insight, which is a kind of weakness that consumers can smell on the wind.
You won't lose a client because your key insight over a year or two doesn't continue to hold. Audience behavior shifts over time, based on a number of factors that corporations and designers can't easily control. But you will lose a client straight out of the gate if your key insight fails to hold up. It means that the foundations of your house were faulty to begin with, and somewhere along the way, due diligence wasn't exercised. So be sure that if you are going to make a client recommendation, the tires have been kicked enough times that you don't have to fear running out of air as you pull onto the highway.
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Now that you understand your client's business logic, their overall marketing needs, and what tactics you're going to employ based on your audience behavior, you're ready to create properly positioned creative concepts. At this point, it may seem like your work is going to be bulletproof, but we're only halfway home. You've got to execute an effective piece of marketing communications! Thankfully, that's the lion's share of what we get paid for, and in many ways, what we'll always need to do best to retain our clients.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. Let's talk about how you apply your marketing strategy and your audience insights to generate tactics that sing.
Based on how you answered your top three questions in Part 4 of this series, you have the answers that you need to select your tactics. So, let's flip those questions around and use them as the proper guide to discuss the thinking that should help shape your tactical marketing approach.
Tell your audience what they want to hear, based on how they feel.
You've determined some key understandings about your audience base. Now distill that material into one key insight that will make them pay attention. Ideally, you have to be able to say this in one sentence (or less) to succeed in selling your client and your shareholders.
In the realm of financial services, think about MasterCard: "Priceless." Or Citi: "Live Richly." Or way back when Washington Mutual knew what they were doing: "More Human Interest." Each of those key insights was an embodiment of how they understood their audience needs. They are all ways of making a dull, droll, somewhat cutthroat industry foster a human connection with their audience. (Reading that previous sentence over again, I'm sounding pretty jaded.)
I'm not saying you always need to come up with some catchy phrase for your client. You just need to know what human insight drives your tactics. Some clients can hand the appropriate insight to you on a platter, and save you plenty of work. If you have a less sophisticated client, or you're being hired to generate this insight, you will need to include this key insight in the brief, or you're taking a big risk.
Talk to your audience where they'll pay the most attention.
Once you have the insight nailed, you go back to your research about where your audience lives and breathes.
If they're business travelers, you could hit them in the taxi, in the airport, on business television, on those little coffee cup sleeves.
If they're consumers, you may recommend redesigning their packaging based on behavioral research and focus groups.
If your audience likes to spend a ton of time online, you could develop a seeding strategy for bloggers, fostering two-way communication between your corporation and your customer base.
Of course, all of these thoughts will dovetail with previous efforts your client has made, and the statistics about how they have performed.
In the good old days, we used to talk about "above the line" communications (a.k.a. television, print, and other high-profile awareness-generating mediums) and "below the line communications" (direct mail, in-store sales, training, anything focused on fostering sales). Nowadays, there is no line. Since we're talking about fostering great customer experiences that lead to long-term relationships with brands, every single customer interaction could lead to a positive or negative impression of a company and its products and services. If a client comes to you saying they want to sell 100,000 more bags of chips a month, you can't just say to run some ads and call it a day. Your approach needs to be multilayered and more sophisticated, taking into account both traditional one-way media communications (such as advertising, collateral, branding) and two-way media communications (such as compelling interactive, social networking, blogging, thought leadership, in-person dialogue).
So while it's easy to tell a company that they need to get in front of 1 million eyeballs to generate 10,000 sales, it's not the appropriate answer anymore. I can't imagine walking into a client's office and advocating that kind of solution without being roundly laughed at. As consumers, we expect dialogue with brands. We know we're in control of the game and have a real voice in the marketplace. Online, your voice can carry just as much weight as 100,000 impressions of a banner advertisement, or more.
Assume the audience won't hear it the first time. Or the second. Or...
Another attribute of your audience research should be focused on how you can craft your communication strategy to surround the right people at the right point in the sales process with the right message. It's no longer "one size fits all" communications that can accomplish every single goal with one swing of the hammer. Be smart about how each touch fosters progress through your sales process, while at the same time, being aware that your customers may only get message 2, 4, and 7 out of your grand media scheme -- meaning that each creative communication should always hit home the key insight and provide some of the support necessary to foster the right kind of experience and prompt some level of future interaction.
Test, test, test. And then test some more.
Return on investment should dictate every move you make in the marketplace. Don't ever put a tactic on the table, such as a long run of television spots, or a grandiose series of online ads, without factoring iteration and improvement into the process. Due to up-to-the-second metrics on interactive properties, clients expect adjustment on the fly. And be prepared to kill a buy midstream or shift media or money to other channels if they don't perform at the right cost per acquisition. Unless your goals include some measure of thought leadership or more favored brand presence, don't think about pouring more cash into "love bombs" or other forms of sheer goodwill without the research to back up the long-term ramifications of your actions.
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In the final part of this series, I'll share some broad guidelines to help your marketing insights take the appropriate form in compelling marketing communications.
Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. In this post, I'm going to detail the key questions that comprise the guts of a high-level marketing strategy and the seeds of both your creative strategy and marketing tactics.
Marketing Strategy at a Glance
Based on our business needs, what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services? From the corporation's point of view, this often boils down to bottom-line impact, moving the needle by a point or two. For designers, this business need must be clothed in a human insight to have any lasting effect on the market.
When embarking on a marketing plan, the following questions need to be addressed and always in this order. Otherwise, you're throwing tactics at the wall like spaghetti.
1. What does the audience want to hear from this company? Is what the company wants also what the audience wants? Before you can propose a strategy, you need to know that the audience is receptive to such messaging. And if they aren't, you need to come back to the client with solid research to indicate the direction they should take.
2. Where does the audience want to hear it? Where does the audience live, breathe, and communicate? Where they live, work, and seek distraction, as well as online destinations where they congregate -- and how much time they spend in those different locations -- are all fair game.
3. What customer problem does this approach solve? Where's the real customer pain you're addressing? If you're creating a pain and then solving it for a customer, then you're going to have a harder row than stepping into your audience's view with something fresh that fulfills a tangible need.
It's important to note that these questions are the core of both your marketing plan and your creative brief. And often all the answers can be found through informal research.
The Importance of (In)Formal Behavioral Research
The questions above can be answered in a number of ways, but most often it requires some level of research. And by research, I'm not talking about 50,000 surveys and heavy focus groups over a period of months around the United States. I'm describing observing your audience in their domain, either through spending some time where they congregate, or doing some anthropology by easing your way into their work environment to gauge how things appear from their point of view. This can be accomplished by engaging with a formal research partner, but in the case of most projects, there isn't time or budget to do so.
So, in lieu of hiring a professional, I do the following.
Spend time in retail environments with the customers. I go out to stores where my client's products are sold and watch every little detail: how people make choices between multiple products, what they may say aloud, whether they interact with salespeople and the quality of their interactions. Designers nowadays are asked to address the overall experience of engaging with a brand, and the sum of these interactions can often give an indication for why people aren't acting in a manner that the corporation would like. The audience is always in control. My rule of thumb is that if I see a behavior repeated 4 to 5 times across multiple stores, it's probably an indication of a much larger concern -- especially if those behaviors are happening across multiple geographies.
Spend time watching how your customers behave online, and if they complain about their on- and off-line experiences. If you can get metrics from your client, combine them with how customers are reacting on wikis, blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. Marry up trends in your Web site statistics, such as fall-off in transactional processes, with real quotes about actual problems that can be solved. Treat every complaint like gold from heaven. If your customers aren't complaining, they probably aren't giving you strong insights.
Do a task analysis. Task analysis allows you to step into the environment of your key audience members and observe how their specific needs can be fulfilled by a the features of a product or service. Ideally, you'd work this kind of research into your agency fee, and a task analysis can help bolster and refine your general behavioral research while also contributing to the development of, say, a complex Web system.
Listen very closely to the client's point of view about their audience. I always read the client's provided research and mine it for insight before going into the world to validate. Even if your client provides you with all the answers, I think it's our responsibility to see if there are any areas in the margin that we can scribble in a little more insight. Designers are intuitive thinkers that can sense the emotional undercurrent of a person's dialogue about, say, a bar of soap. Teasing out those details provide the shape of how our audience is behaving at this moment in time, and what they expect out of any kind of corporate communication. Sometimes your audience is moving so quickly that how they felt six months ago isn't an accurate snapshot of where they are now -- and where they are headed tomorrow.
The following is a gut check that I always apply at the end of research.
See what can and can't be controlled in the sales process. Ever been asked to sell more product when the product really isn't very good, or when you can't control the customer's experience in the store? When doing research, you need to be aware of what you can actually accomplish. You may need to share with the client that their goals are unreasonable, and propose a sturdier, more realistic course of action.
Until They Pay, Keep Your Research Close to Your Chest
Keep in mind that working through this kind of research, especially before you've been paid a fee, is something that you should parcel out to the client very carefully. Depending on the scale of the project, this kind of research and analysis can take a good number of days, and time is money for any design professional.
I recommend that you determine the depth of your research in advance of agreeing to respond to the client proposal or request, and try to keep it to a budget. When I aim for a major piece of business, I dive hard into the research and try to come up with a strong insight before determining any course of action. If the project is at a much smaller scale, those insights may have to wait until they've signed the work order and we've started in on the creative brief.
Once you've collected this information, and you have distilled it into the key themes or trends that indicate a strong support to the business problem, you're ready to talk about marketing tactics, which will follow in our next installment.
Consumers now expect sustainability and ecological sensitivity to be factored into the cost of manufacturing and selling consumer goods. Corporations such as Patagonia, through their Footprint Chronicles, and Timberland, with their nutrition label for social responsibility, have started a major trend that pulls back the veil on the apparel industry, making us aware of the major demands that the textile industry put on our world. It's not enough to just offset your purchases. Through our purchasing decisions, we can alter how the industry operates.
The EcoTag for apparel, shown below in a draft format, was designed as a prototype to make sustainability factors more transparent for purchasing decisions across all brands -- not just these brave few who are striving to lead the industry. The ultimate goal of the EcoTag is to incent corporations to make their sustainability measures accountable to their customers. “Sustainability grading” or other methods of ranking products, derived from ecotagging, would create new ways for customers to evaluate the value of a product, while forcing corporations that have since been uninterested in bringing sustainability practices to their businesses to change their behavior.
The front panel of the tag displays the standard SKUs for a product, as well as the costs of offsets and recycling that have been factored into the product price.
The back panel of the EcoTag gives a view into how a piece of apparel was sourced, produced, and shipped, as well as the average carbon cost and whether the clothing is organic, recycled, and/or biodegradeable.
Ideally, the tag would be resized, printed, and affixed to goods in a way that had minimal impact on the product’s carbon footprint.
Without an industry-wide standard for this type of information, it will continue to be difficult for consumers to make educated decisions about what they purchase and how their purchases will influence the world. With proper education of the consumer at point of purchase, the latent waste of the textiles industry may be reduced and ideally replaced with more sustainable options.
Download a one-page PDF summary of this piece at this link: http://www.davidsherwin.com/EcoTagForApparel.pdf.
If you're interested in helping with this endeavor, please feel free to contact me at david at davidsherwin.com.
Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.
To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. This post talks about qualifying the competition and distilling what you've learned.
Qualify the Competition and How It Shapes the Problem
After the client presents the business problem and you ask necessary questions to understand its context, look at everything you can find that frames the problem from the competitor's point of view.
Clear business strategy is crucial for us designers in presenting proposals or participating in a pitch, where clients may intentionally refrain from disclosing key information to see how much you can glean and intuit from the scraps scattered across the media and the Internet.
You need to sniff out the business reasons for specific marketing initiatives through client interviews and research in order to ensure that you're making the most appropriate strategic decisions to solve their business problem.
You also need to show that you understand the world that your client lives in, understanding the trends that shape their industry.
This is different from traditional market research, which would live in your marketing strategy.
This is knowing which competitors are privately held, and sometimes more nimble, versus publicly traded. Which products in their industry are selling the best, and why. What the analysts from Forrester and other trending firms are saying about your industry category. What the Wall Street Journal noted in their most recent column on your corporate outlook. What is going on locally and globally on a cultural level that could have an impact on your business.
All these elements shape the world view that your client holds. Being able to present this kind of information, peppered through your ongoing communication, lets your client know that you appreciate where they're coming from -- and helps to support your creative strategy from a business perspective.
Distill What You've Learned to Show Understanding
The best trust-building exercise with a new client is reflecting back to them what they said, in an intelligent manner, with a few key learnings that they may not be aware of.
Whenever you write a proposal for a new project, you should begin the document with a narrative articulation of the client's business case and current strategy. This shows to the client that you understand their business needs at a high level, and any marketing recommendations that may follow are derived directly from their needs.
Always try to simply answer Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The How? is always proposed through what follows the business strategy: our marketing strategy.
As you craft this paragraph or two, be aware of your audience. As such, I make it as simple and quick to understand as possible. I always pretend, as I'm writing, that the CEO of the company could get their hands on this document. Besides, don't you want the CEO signing off on the dotted line and handing you that nice big project?
Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.
To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. Let's talk about quantifying the business problem in this post.
Quantify the Business Problem(s)
New clients can articulate a wide range of business needs, but most often, their business requires short-term sales generation and stable, long-term growth in revenue that leads to profit.
Short-term sales are contingent on tactical marketing decisions. Long-term sales require a holistic view of all marketing communications and a full awareness of the client's brand equity and its increase in value over time. Solving a long-term business problem often requires making large assumptions, and since they are often not in your direct control, your marketing solutions will require some measure of flexibility.
Even if a client walks in the door requesting an awareness-generation campaign that has no sales metrics, it's inevitable that in the long-term view, they need to make money from selling their soda or flat-panel TVs.
With this in mind, I try to strip away the tangibles from a client request -- we need a new identity, help us improve our advertising -- and work backward into what business need is driving their request. I always try to understand how they arrived at this decision, and what needs to happen after the decision in the short and long term to ensure it has an impact.
Here's how some of these client requests can be translated from tactical requests into business needs, and then attacked as creative challenges.
If it's a short-term problem (1-3 months): I need to sell 5,000 loaves of bread by May 31st.
Why? Because I am $100,000 short on revenue this quarter and I need to fulfill our budget objectives to maintain our profit margin.
Why is this valuable to know? It allows us to determine if there are more creative approaches to bringing in the million dollars in revenue. Could we sell more pastries and dinner rolls along with the loaves of bread? Creative thinkers are good at thinking around business challenges to find these novel approaches.
If it's a long-term problem (4-12 months): I want to launch three new MP3 players over the next year and gain a 6% share of the MP3 market in sales, while raising our brand equity by 10%.
Why? We've lost 20,000 customers to our largest competitor in this space and our research has shown that our brand equity has decreased by 4 points due to our competitor's behavior. If this continues, we will take a net loss that may require selling off this portion of our business.
Why is this valuable to know? Knowing the reasons behind their request creates an opportunity to do due diligence. Can their business problem be solved with marketing alone? Over the long-term, what activities from both a business and a marketing perspective would be necessary to forge a clear plan of attack?
Remember to be respectful in how you ask clients for this information. Often, they are in trouble when they ask for your help, and want you to approach their request as an opportunity (a positive challenge), not as a problem.
This is the era of design as more than just a strategic business initiative -- it's a way of life and a method of bringing creative thinking to rational, left-brained business professionals.
With the current shift from design as a decorative function to design as a business requirement, designers have been forced to equip an arsenal of tools that go beyond what we'd traditionally call design. As such, we designers have been appending the word "strategy" to everything that we do, perhaps in the belief that it creates a higher-level business orientation to our often intuitive decision-making process. Brand strategy. Content strategy. Design strategy. Interaction strategy. Media strategy. We've developed a strategic nomenclature that is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The list goes on and on and on.
But design within marketing as a core business function only has three fundamental strategies. These are what our clients recognize as indispensable foundations for any creative project, though they aren't all "creative" in the traditional sense. And design strategy can't exist without them.
1. Business Strategy
This is big picture thinking that encompasses the most important questions for any corporation: cash flow, product creation and distribution, and overall operations. Marketing strategy and tactical strategy fall out of overall business strategy and support the overall business needs.
To make a bold generalization: this is the area that designers often impact the most, with the least desire of input by the business principals. After all, we have BFAs, not MBAs.
2. Overall Marketing Strategy
Based on our business needs -- which may be informed by marketing -- what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services?
This is an aggregate view of tactics that can be taken and their intended reactions in the market at large, concerning long-term brand equity and value as well as short-term sales gains. Most designers want to own this space, as they can predict and control each project that they engage.
3. Tactical Marketing Strategy
What is the approach that governs each individual action that we need to take, and in what channel(s)? This is where we get to do the tangible design work, and reap the rewards of implementing a project properly. Without the proper tactics, you won't have creative that makes an impact.
Over the coming weeks, I'm going to outline a taxonomy of how our creative strategies, as designers, can be properly forged by these three fundamental marketing strategies. I'm also going to outline some baseline rules that can govern what creative strategies you choose, what you outsource to partners, and what you decline to include in your core set of capabilities that you share with your clients.
Don't associate your products with other brands unless they perfectly mirror a lifestyle.
High-end brands are being extended across categories -- and faltering.
Brands that offer services and brands that contribute to lifestyles (such as Starbucks) can't cross over into luxury goods, and vice-versa, without thinning their brand. Can you imagine a Starbucks BMW? A Godiva Porsche? No way. There's no parity between them. But I believe in the Eddie Bauer edition of the Ford Explorer... barely.
Everyone has their own internal weights and measures when it comes to rationalizing a purchase, but I think it's fair to say this: A jacket is a jacket and is not a car. Don't overreach your category, your brand space, and what your customers will believe. It's better to cross-promote your products to another brand's audience than to badge your products incorrectly or mash your products up to try to be unique.
Don't price based on cost of goods. Price on aspirations.
People are more likely to rocket due to perceived value, not real value.
The luxury category has fragmented by budget. Audiences are asked to pay closer and closer attention to nuanced categories, with the idea that they'll always aspire to a product out of their budget.
This is known as "rocketing" in a product category, see the fantastic book Trading Up for an in-depth treatise about New Luxury or "masstige" marketing and how it differs from the old mindset about luxury goods and how the market is evolving luxury into new forms.
Don't tell a completely new story about your brand when you've already staked your ground.
If you didn't start close to the luxury space, you'll never create cachet around your product without expending a vast quantity of capital to change perception. Start a new brand if you really want to get in the game.
Don't make more! Limited quantity equals controlled demand.
Easy to understand in theory, but very hard to pull off when people start beating down your door waving fat wads of cash. Companies often cave and produce more when they should just have a plan in place as to how they can extend that demand into a new (similar) offering.
And last, but certainly not least:
Don't horse it up.
"Less is more," more or less. With clean design and smart production tactics it's relatively easy to convey an aura of luxury and exclusivity.
This is the expected first route for a designer to take with a luxury product, so don't think you have to beat a path through the weeds to engage your audience and emerge with something too novel from a branding perspective. Does it really convey the right feeling if the design is incredibly busy? Unless you're conveying some level of sophistication, your audience will have trouble understanding why they should pay 2 to 10 times the price of the competition.
When do clients get upset? When they expect something common -- such as a swift response to an email -- and you don't write back for a day. Or when you show two concepts when the contract said four. Or, heavens forbid, you show up for a meeting 15 minutes late and don't call them well ahead to warn them.
No matter whether you're flying solo or working within an agency, there are key expectations that every client considers a given: timeliness, transparency, value, and respect.
Read these next paragraphs in the voice of the client that appreciates you most.
The Design Client's Bill of Rights
1. Timeliness
I know when I'm getting deliverables, how long I have to review them, and when I need to pay you for them. Up front, on a schedule, net 30 or 60 -- this must be clear from the start of our engagement.
Additionally, we will keep to scheduled meeting times and you will not be late without warning. I am always exempt from rebuke for tardiness, as I am busy working to ensure your work is approved with your best interests in mind. However, if you're billing me by the hour and my lateness is costing me money, please gently let me know.
Once a schedule is set, your work will never be late, unless an unforeseen circumstance arises and you contact me well in advance of the deadline to ensure that my superiors do not clobber us for the possible appearance of unprofessionalism. If we change the scope of our project, I expect you to negotiate a new schedule with me that allows the work to proceed to the best of your ability without compromising fully our initial time frame.
2. Transparency
I need to know where we're at in the project at any time.
I need to know the thinking behind the work that you show me, the work that I choose, and when necessary the work that I decline. I am your advocate in my corporation/organization and need to be able to own the agency's perspective when I speak before my boss, my CEO, my peers, and the general public. Do not assume that you will be able to participate in every meeting within my company to defend the work.
I need to know the impact my project will have on my customers, my company, and the world at large, not to mention sustainability issues and ethical concerns that may transcend the work and damage our reputations.
3. Value
I am always seeking fairness in agency/designer fees. I will mindfully defer on negotiating minor fee changes if my project has a major, provable impact on brand equity.
That said, my corporation will usually require me to bid work through multiple agencies, so be aware that the cost of your work will always be factored into the overall value of our potential relationship. If you're underbid, that doesn't mean I'll always choose the lower bidder. I will choose the best vendor for the project.
Don't hide costs or penalize me for the lack of forethought in your bidding or my strategic approach. Work with me as a partner to help me understand where we need to meet, both fiscally and professionally, so that both of us win.
If you can't do the work for the costs you estimated, let me off the hook quickly enough to allow me to engage with another vendor before my boss fires me, or bring me options that both of us can live with, being mindful that I may not return to work with you again -- no matter how great the final result can be.
4. Respect
If I smell oversized ego, or if you tell me I just don't get it, then you're history. I'm responsible for my business and have to live with the consequences of your recommendations.
I expect you to convey, through everything that you do for me, the knowledge that you care and respect our shared partnership. We have a relationship that is predicated on our focus on creating meaningful design communications. This can influence everything: how you dress, how you talk, how you describe your work to my boss, how we catch a beer after work and you respect the client/designer boundary. We aren't friends. We are colleagues.
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If you have the ability to do so, you should write up expectations for what your clients should expect of you right as you're hired.
If you can't return an email in two hours, tell them. If you need one to two days flexibility on your project milestones because you're overloaded in your studio, tell them up front. Don't surprise them along the way. If you do, you'll risk diminishing your long-term relationship and chances for success because of something unspoken, unfulfilled, or unwittingly ignored.
A day will come when people will pay more -- by an order of magnitude, I expect -- for things that are not only well made and technologically sophisticated and desirable in the marketplace, but also intentionally crass and funny and ironic and over-engineered and technologically overblown and completely painful to look at.
I'm not talking about vintage revival, chuckle-inducing wagon-wheel coffee tables and 100-dollar torn t-shirts emblazoned with witticisms that elicit stares from fashionistas as they paw through the clothing racks at the upscale boutiques. I'm not talking about fashion shows where people parade down the runway with outfits that look like they're cobbled together with urinals and clothing dredged from dumpsters. I'm definitely not talking about gangsta styling with mass appropriation of high-value items that are then paraded through high-production-value videos on MTV to sell albums full of cringe-inducing props to Dom Perignon and Courvoisier.
For starters, I'm envisioning those who drive cars inspired by the Edsel or the Delorean, because it's crass enough to be cool. I'm envisioning people who spend vast quantities of money for clothes that are just so ugly it's like you're looking at a train wreck. I'm envisioning big hulks of stereo technology that completely dominate your living room, like modern sculpture on crystal meth.
In short, I'm envisioning people standing on the very edge of popular fashion and technological innovation, leaping off of it, landing flat on their face in the mud, rolling around in it, and making sure that everyone knows they paid through the nose for it.
This future trend would come to be known as crasstige. I've Googled the term and it hasn't appeared on the Internet -- until now. And as I'm the one throwing my stake in the ground, let's venture a real definition of the term:
crasstige (n., adj.):1) a high-cost product that intentionally goes against the grain of popular taste and fashion in its design. Example: Wow, that $2,000 hat he bought is so ugly... It is completely crasstige.
2) a category of products that, when consumers purchase them, immediately broadcast their frustration with traditional notions of luxury. Example: Bob is a real crasstige sort of guy. He bought the Scion xQ with the argyle pattern.
But here's the twist -- the little quirk that makes the idea of crasstige so interesting and of-the-moment:
3) a mashup of attributes between different product categories, creating a new item that seems on the surface to lack functional utility. Example: That's some crasstige handbag you've got there... Yep, it's hip, it has a refrigerator compartment, a clock radio, it checks my stock prices, and I can plug in a little doodad that checks my blood sugar.
The idea of a mashup is so popular in digital culture, it's inevitable that it will bleed into manufactured objects. An item denoted as crasstige would cross boundaries between convenience and utility and product categories for no real reason other than to be crazy. There is no single utility from a truly crasstige item. It's the inverse of the orderly universe of an iPhone.
This is not the kind of trend that will just appear on the street in one year, fully baked. I'm thinking this is the kind of snowball-becomes-an-avalance thinking that will surface when we emerge from recession, as a kind of conspicuous consumption gone haywire, fed by small artisans and then major corporations who smell a trend and dive into it with ferocity.
Like most trend predictions, I hope this one falls by the wayside, never coming to pass. But if it does, let us be ready for the ferocious parade of scary manufactured goods that further contribute to the clutter of the world, and vote with our pocketbooks as designers for items that connote elegant form, utility and function, meaning and sustainability, and some measure of grace.
As designers that seek order and polish, this is a trend that we will passionately hate. So don't shoot the oracle.
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