Vortex Cannon

This is cool…

Courtesy of BBC One.

Crazy About A Mercury

Riding around town on a bicycle, running errands the other day, and I came across an old, neglected car. Looked like a Mercury Montclair from 1964 — one of the cooler cars from my past (I think one of my uncles had a white one; probably Marian). One of the more distinctive roof lines, for sure. The “Mercury” song came to mind.

Do we still have musicians recording songs about cars? Alan Jackson had a hit with “Mercury Blues” in 1992 (originally written and recorded by KC Douglas in 1956 as “Mercury Boogie”). Ford Motor Co. bought the rights to the song, using it to sell Ford trucks afterward. I’ve always liked that song. Good for selling cars, too.

Proprietary songs/music/jingles are a fading art. Can you still sing the Schaefer Beer jingle? I can. Older folks, do you remember “see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet?” By the way,  the Schaefer ads were :60 spots:

Other “car songs” inevitably come to mind, some more marketable than others. “Little G.T.O.” by Ronny and The Daytonas was translated into German and used by VW for their GTI (“Kleiner GTI”), which I thought was brilliant. The lyrics via Hemmings Auto Blogs (with translation):

Kleiner GTI / Little GTI
Du siehst prima aus / well, you look so fine
Ich liebe, dich zu fahren / How I love to drive you
Hol’ die leistrung ‘raus / Let the performance shine
Hör nur, wie er sich anlasst / Listen when I start it
Steck’ den schlussel ‘rein / Stick the key in the ignition
Er ist bereit zum start / And it’s ready to go
Wie er braust / How it zips
Wie er saust, GTI. / How it zooms, GTI.
Werde bargeld, sparen / I’ll save up some money
Kauf’ den GTI / Buy a GTI
er fahrt mit mir lassig / ’cause it drives so easy
An den andren vorbei, / past the other cars
Uberholt benzinfresser / Passes all the gas-hogs
Macht mir spass dabei / Makes me smile a while
Und jedermann sagt sich dann bloss, / And everyone thinks to themselves
“Kleiner wagen-du bist gross” / “Little car – you’re grand”
Er ist bereit zum start / It’s always ready to go
Wie er braust / How it zips
Wie er saust, GTI. / How it zooms, GTI.
Wah wah… wah wah wah wah wah….

The Dead Milkmen’s “Bitchin Camaro” was not used by Chevrolet in their marketing, for obvious reasons. Will they under Bob Lutz? You never know. He’s only 77, and he’s got an old Czech-built fighter jet he flies himself (or at he used to). He’s in charge of marketing at GM now and I think he’ll do a good job. I was reminded by an interview published in Business Week that he was running BMW marketing in Munich when they came up with “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” Not too shabby.

Here’s what he had to say about how marketing dollars were spent:

To spend $200 million on manufacturing, we have to get board approval, with top management involved from an early stage. Yet we spend billions on marketing and delegate that to too many people at the lowest levels. It’s insanity. Now, ideas on how to tell our story will be reviewed by me and often by Fritz [CEO Henderson]. We remade the global design process by going with our instincts, not consumer testing. This process will be analogous to that.

And I bet they had metrics, and lots of them. Focus on differentiating your brand, and the rest will fall into place. Use your experience. Jack Trout (who also picked up on the Lutz quote) wrote about it in Ad Age today:

Chief marketing officers have shorter tenures than NFL coaches. They rarely last two years before they are gone.

As BusinessWeek commented in an article on the subject, “the job is radioactive.” The article cited a well-known search company as stating that 70% of the companies don’t know what they’re looking for when they recruit a CMO.

In my estimation, Advertising Age had the answer to the short CMO tenure in an interesting piece of research on senior marketers. It was done by Anderson Analytics, which surveyed a group of 1,657 senior marketing executives (600 replied).

Anderson asked respondents to rank the marketing concepts they pay most attention to in their jobs. They spend the most time on customer satisfaction (88%), customer retention (86%), segmentation (83%), competitive intelligence (82%), brand loyalty (82%), search-engine optimization (81%), marketing ROI (80%), quality (79%), data mining (78%) and personalization (79%).

This is why CMOs are being fired left and right. On the list of things on which they are working, differentiation doesn’t even make the top 10. While they are worrying about customers or segmentation or ROI or search-engine optimization, their brands are sinking into a sea of commoditization.

If you think I’m overstating the problem of commoditization, let me give you some numbers. A research organization called Brand Keys has been tracking this problem via an analysis of 1,847 products and services in 75 categories. The results are frightening. On average, the study found that only 21% of all products and services examined had any points of differentiation that were meaningful to consumers. That’s nearly 10% less than in a benchmark study that was conducted in 2003.

To better understand this, take the automotive category. It has a reasonable percentage of differentiation, at 38%. That means you have a fair number of differentiated brands such as Toyota (reliability) or BMW (driving) or Volvo (safety) or Mercedes (prestige). It also means you have a large number of placeholders such as GM and Ford. The marketers at these companies are certainly not earning any respect.

Figuring out the right differentiating strategy is only the beginning. Marketing then has to convince the CEO and CFO that building or even maintaining a brand is a long-term process that requires patience and incremental change. You’ll have to avoid line extensions that undermine what the brand stands for in the mind. And Wall Street will be a problem you will have to get around, with its focus on quarterly and monthly results. With Mr. Lutz in charge, he is in a perfect position to do the convincing.

Bob Lutz is on the stick — with “a heightened state of awareness of the angle of attack at all times.”

Top States for Business

CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business ranking have New Jersey in the top 10 for “quality of life” and #3 in education. I’m surprised at the former, not so much the latter.

Who’s last? Oh, you betcha.

Ice Cream!

I can almost hear the the Mister Softee music playing in my head. If you grew up in New York City, you know what I mean. In Brooklyn, the passing ice cream truck would get mobbed by kids on every block — each clutching mom’s money.

In the suburbs of New Jersey, I’ll occasionally see a beat-up old van, hand-painted, with a freezer in the back, reselling popsicles.  Mister Softee dispensed the good stuff.

Geek Cap

The folks at ThinkGeek.com are doing it right.  They know their customers, and they know what they’ll buy.

Whether they sell a lot of WiFi caps or not, it’s entertaining enough for online browsers — who, in this case, happen to be shopping. Made me click around. Found an excellent backpack, too.

Add to cart, geeks.

Interesting Results

A few months ago, I subscribed to an HDTV service that carried the Voom HD channels from Cablevision. Slowly, these channels started dropping out of the channel line-ups. One of the first to go was Mojo HD, which featured one of the more memorable new programs,”Three Sheets” — a program that combined travel and drinking. Scripps Networks’ Fine Living TV picked up the series last month.

One of the more memorable ads on the show was The World’s Most Interesting Man from Dos Equis.

I thought the ad was well done and the positioning unique and distinctive. I had a hunch it would move some product for the brewer. Well, look at this: Ad Age is reporting their sales are up 17%:

Through mid-June, a period when imported beer sales dropped 11%, sales of Dos Equis rose more than 17%, moving the brand into eighth place among imports (in a tie with Stella Artois), when shipments rose 13%. That success prompted Heineken executives, who had been running the ads since 2007 in a few stronghold markets for the brand, to take the message national this spring.

“There’s never really been an import brand that’s been built so clearly through advertising,” said Benj Steinman, publisher of Beer Marketer’s Insights.

Equally unprecedented is the campaign’s reliance on two things rarely seen — actively shunned, even — in beer ads: a gray-haired protagonist, played in the Dos Equis ads by veteran TV actor Jonathan Goldsmith, who in every ad acknowledges that he doesn’t always drink beer.

But to hear the people behind the campaign tell it, there was really no other way to effectively attack the 2006 brief, which challenged the agency to “establish a distinctive, desirable and premium identity as evidenced by significant growth of key brand-tracking measures,” which would, in turn, be “different from other brands,” a “cool brand” and be “worth paying more for.”

They came up with a character who has spent his life, according to the grainy images in the spots, engaging in swordplay, leading mysterious expeditions, reeling in large sailfish and arm wrestling soldiers. The images are provided without context or explanation, which is the point.

Excellent results, my friends.

Greenway Developments

Run your in-town errands via bicycle? Good idea! Almost get run-over by a car, truck or bus? Scary, isn’t it? In my little town,  not all the streets are bike-friendly, so I tend to ride up on the sidewalks — especially with the kids. We’ll ride through parks and along bike paths, but we like to explore from time to time. The New Jersey Department of Transportation publishes biking guides, so we plan to ride some of those, too. But you’ve got to load the bikes and take a drive.

For convenience, we’ve been riding the old Lehigh Valley Railroad’s Perth Amboy-South Plainfield line, which was abandoned many years ago. It will soon become part of the Edison Greenway, which includes a new bridge over U.S. Route 1. Eventually, you’ll be able to ride or walk it from South Plainfield, past the Triple C Ranch, all the way to the Woodbridge Center mall.

Like the idea of converting old railroad rights-of-way to greenways? I do, and I plan to get involved with Rail to Trails.

M.J. Tributes

Nice tribute (hat tip to artbistro): 1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines at practice. Here’s the video from a couple of years ago…

Can you beat that? Ya, in Stockholm by BouncE Streetdance Company…

One of many tributes.

Le Tour

We know the Tour de France is happening now — and exciting sponsor-fest in Europe. Sometimes we need to be reminded how dangerous it can be for the riders.

Here’s one from the Tour de Suisse. Love the English commentary:

How’s Your Virus?

And why do I refuse to run McAfee and Norton? They’re a pain in the processor.

Now, via The Register, I feel better than ever about my decision:

IT admins across the globe are letting out a collective groan after servers and PCs running McAfee VirusScan were brought down when the anti-virus program attacked their core system files. In some cases, this caused the machines to display the dreaded blue screen of death.

Details are still coming in, but forums here and here show that it’s affecting McAfee customers in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. A UK-based Reg reader, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized by his employer to speak to the press, said the glitch simultaneously leveled half of a customer’s 140 machines after they updated to the latest virus signature file.

//

“Literally half of the machines were down with this McAfee anti-virus message IDing valid programs as having this trojan,” the IT consultant said. “Literally half the office switched off their PCs and were just twiddling their thumbs.”

I remember our IT folks running this idiotic program at 12 noon on Tuesdays. Slowed me down to a crawl every time. Way to go, helpdesk.

Personally, I run a bunch of free stuff on my PCs, and the Macs, well, why bother?