Why Do Fashion Ads All Look Alike?

As Christmas approaches and gift giving is on our mind, I've been paying a little more attention to the perfume, cosmetic and jewelry ads that dominate all the women's fashion magazines.  You know the ads I'm talking about.  The ones that feature the world's highest priced models (or major Hollywood stars) photographed by the world's most expensive photographers advertising the world's most overpriced women's products.

These ads follow a different school of thought about marketing and brand positioning than all of us non-fashion marketers have been trained to believe in.  The main thing that always strikes me is that in the world of fashion marketing, it is OK for your ads to look the same (practically identical) to your competition's ads.  It's not only OK, it seems to be a requirement.

Is this simply something that's just accepted dogma in the world of fashion marketing or is it something that they know for a fact actually works for them?

Before writing this entry, I opened up the December issue of Vogue to find some examples of what I mean.  Spread before me are perfume ads from Estee Lauder, Dior, Dolce Gabbana and Versace.  These ads have virtually identical layouts.  I really mean IDENTICAL.  Not only are the layouts all the same, but none of the ads have anything remotely approaching "an idea."  Each ad is "pretty face (come hither look) , big bottle, logo."  No headlines, no copy, no ideas.  

In any other marketing category (with the possible exception of automotive where almost all of the print ads look like the same art director put them together, too) having a print campaign that was identical to a competitor's campaign would be considered a problem.  Not in the world of fashion.  I wonder why.

Don't the same laws of marketing apply to these products?  Isn't it just as important to stand out in the world of fashion and have a unique identity that differentiates your brand from those you compete with?  Isn't it just as important to have a campaign concept with an idea behind it? A pretty super model simply isn't an idea.  

I think most fashion marketers are guilty of assuming that just because their super model and their perfume bottle is different from the competition's super model and bottle that consumers will see the difference between the brands.  

Maybe women who read the fashion magazines religiously understand and appreciate the subtle brand differentiation that is in these ads.  However, my hunch is that they don't and that most fashion marketers are kidding themselves.  I recommend that they wake up and smell the perfume. What they're doing now strikes me as marketing insanity.

 

Chicago Tribune Files for Bankruptcy - Why Are Newspapers in Trouble?

I may be "old school" but I have to have my morning newspaper.  Wherever I've lived, I've subscribed to the local paper, The New York Times and The Wall St. Journal.  When I travel, I love to pick up USA Today.  But I'm apparently unusual.  Newspapers are quickly losing readers and advertisers.  The current recession is making matters worse as most advertisers are cutting back.  Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune made news by filing for bankruptcy.  

There are many younger Americans who now find newspapers irrelevant and hopelessly old fashioned.  They consume their news digitally.  They can get the news they want (and only what they want) on their PDAs immediately when the news is happening.   Why should they buy a printed newspaper that is out of the date and behind on breaking news events the minute it's printed?  Besides, that old printed thing has all sorts of stuff in it that they're not interested in reading, including most of the ads.  And, on top of everything else, newspapers create waste and they aren't as environmentally friendly as other ways to get the news.

With both technological and environmental trends solidly against them, are newspapers doomed?  Maybe.  What should marketing sanity look like to today's struggling newspapers?  What should they be doing?  If you were in charge of one, what would you be doing?

Job 1:  Hold on to your current subscribers.  Are newspapers reaching out to their readers with special offers, services and new product features that will preserve their loyalty?  Or are they milking their customer base?  Is sending that monthly or quarterly bill the only time they communicate?

Job 2:  Product development.  What can newspapers do to become relevant to the digital generation?  Are they developing and testing new ideas with a sense of urgency?  Are they trying to find ways to become Purple Cows (see my earlier blog on this topic).  Or are they resigned to having lost this audience forever?

Job 3:  Diversification and alliances.  The engine of every newspaper is news gathering and reporting.  These are assets that are valuable and unique.  How can these assets be fully leveraged with other businesses that need and value the content and information that is being created?  Similarly, how can newspapers do a better job of bundling the advertising impressions they deliver by partnering with other media?  What unique advertiser synergies can be created?

I think that the newspaper business has been too insular for too long.  Insular industries only hire from within.  The old ways are accepted as gospel.  "Experience" is more valuable than innovation.  New people with fresh ideas aren't recruited.  New ideas aren't developed and those that are have difficulty taking root and gaining advocacy.  These industries become inbred which is one short step away from becoming extinct.  The auto industry has certainly been guilty of this and I suspect the newspaper business is similarly guilty. 

Learn a lesson from these industries that are now struggling so mightily to survive.  Routinely recruit new people from outside the company and outside your industry.  They will come with fresh new ideas that are needed in every company.  Listen.  Test.  Implement.  Change.  Don't ever become satisfied with the status quo.  

Selling vs Service. Does Your Company Need an Attitude Adjustment?

Do you work for a company where there is intense pressure to sell?  

These kind of companies typically demonstrate an overriding executive level fixation on financial performance instead of customer service.  Financial success is driven by two things: growing revenues and cutting costs.  When these tasks become the overwhelming fixation of senior executives, your company may be in need of a serious attitude adjustment.  When executives create a corporate culture where there is this intense pressure to sell in order to sustain revenue growth,  they are almost certainly also creating a corporate culture where customer service takes a back seat.

When companies lose focus on customer service and only look upon their customers as an entity that you sell things to, it's a problem.  They've lost sight of why customers are doing business with them in the first place and they're on the road to ruin.   These companies need to undergo a major attitude adjustment from Selling to Service.  Here's why. 

No one likes to be sold.  Not in their personal life and not in a business context either.  When you sense that you are "being sold", what happens?  Your barriers go up and the skeptical listening center of your brain goes into full gear.  We instinctively don't trust someone who is trying to sell us something.  It's takes hard work and artful salesmanship to overcome those barriers and actually sell anything.

On the other hand, everyone likes to be helped.  It's why you're greeted in a store with "How can I help you, today?"  When was the last time anyone greeted you with "What can I sell you today?"  When we think someone is trying to help us, our barriers disappear and we usually experience gratitude rather than skepticism.  Over time, gratitude grows into trust.  And trust creates customers for life.  This seems like a total no-brainer to me.  Why would any company want potential customers to feel skeptical (ie- always be in selling mode) when they can choose to make them feel grateful and trustful (ie- by being in service mode)?  

If your company is always stuck in selling mode, it needs an attitude adjustment.  The primary focus of any company should be on service as opposed to selling.  If the executives are only looking at sales metrics and not service metrics, something is wrong.  When you're successful at service, sales follow.  When you stink at customer service, you will soon stink at sales, too.

Budweiser and Dr Pepper Both Need to Lighten Up

I've spent a lot of years in the beverage business, so I pay more attention to what all the major players are doing with their marketing and advertising than the average Joe.  I'm more likely to notice when any of them do something particularly clever or when any of them do something that seems boneheaded.

In general, I am a huge fan of how Budweiser handles its marketing and advertising investment, but their new "Drinkability" strategy for Bud Light strikes me as completely ridiculous.  Who are they talking to?  

1. Are they trying to persuade competitive beer drinkers to switch to Bud Light because it is somehow easier to drink?  Do they think that someone is finding their current brand of suds hard to drink?  Do they think that any beer drinker needs permission to drink more beer?  
   
2. Are they talking to current Bud Light drinkers to persuade them to stay with the brand because it is more "drinkable", whatever the heck that means? 

Target audience issues aside, what makes Budweiser think that they can leverage "drinkability" in the first place?  It's a silly concept that has no universal meaning.  What's drinkable to me may not be drinkable to you.  There is no objective standard that defines "drinkability."  When you watch the ads, you see that they struggle to explain the term and then they try to convince you that Bud Light has more of it.  This is a recipe for advertising disaster and all the ads that I've seen stink.  They are so tragically beneath the high standard that Budweiser has established for its advertising that it makes you wonder "what is wrong at Bud HQ these days?"  I predict sanity will soon reign again at Bud and that this direction for them will be very short-lived.

The other beverage company that has puzzled me in the last year with the strategic direction of their advertising is Dr Pepper.  The first misstep was trying to persuade people that 7 Up was "natural."  It's a soft drink for crying out load!  There is practically nothing more unnatural.  This strategy was an insult to our collective intelligence.  7 Up is "The Uncola" and why they have abandoned that fundamentally sound brand positioning is beyond me.

Dr Pepper has recently launched a new strategy for the mother brand, Dr Pepper.  The brand has traditionally been positioned around user imagery - specifically the individuality of Dr Pepper drinkers compared to cola drinkers.  "Be a Pepper" was a delightful expression of that and it worked for the brand for years.  Now, they're trying to persuade me that Dr Pepper should be my soft drink because of its more complex flavor - specifically that is made up of 23 different flavors.  Am I the only one who finds this not only hard to believe but completely irrelevant?  Since when was buying a soft drink about something so esoteric as its flavor recipe?  Why should I care that is has 23 different flavors?  The only imagery it brings to my mind is that of the pretentious wine drinker who sniffs and sips and then pronounces that the wine has "a note of blackberries and a slight aroma of cherries."  Dr Pepper isn't wine.  It's a soft drink.  

Both Budweiser and Dr Pepper need to lighten up.  Beers and soft drinks are supposed to be about fun, good times and sociability.  It's not rocket science.  It's not about complex concepts like "drinkability" and "23 flavors." It's about simple physical and emotional refreshment.   

How to be Terrible at Customer Service - Copy Credit Card or Cable TV Companies

I don't think I'm alone in having had terrible customer service experiences with my credit card and cable TV providers.  I'm not talking about one time, either.  I'm talking about nightmares that have occurred repeatedly over the years with a number of different providers of each type of service.

I've switched around in response and I'm still looking for a provider that really understands what excellent customer service means and how to deliver it.  

Here's the main thing that each of them do wrong.

Credit card companies lure you in with offers of low interest rates.  They run promotions to get you to transfer balances to their cards at low interest rates.  They do all they can to get you to run up a high balance on their cards.  Then, they lower the boom.  They find an excuse to jack up the interest rate by an astronomical amount.  Maybe one of your payments arrived two days late.  Oops.  You've violated your agreement and opened the door for them to raise their rates. This is just plain sleazy and I hope our new Congress finally addresses this abuse.  All of a sudden that manageable balance at the original interest rate becomes an impossible to pay off balance at the new interest rate.  GOTCHA!  

If any of the existing credit card companies would swear off this practice, they'd either immediately dominate the market or force all the others to follow them.  If a customer's credit standing dictates a higher interest rate, make that new rate apply only to new balances incurred AFTER they have been notified of a rate hike.  Allowing these companies to retroactively apply a much higher interest rate to balances that were created with the understanding that the rate was much lower is just WRONG.  The credit card company immediately becomes your enemy instead of being your friend.  It's the worst possible way to deal with your customers.

Cable TV companies are renown for awful customer service.  The satellite TV providers and now the phone companies (Fios) have responded and what was once a comfortable monopoly is now doggedly competitive.  My experience is that whenever anything goes wrong with your cable TV service, it can take weeks for someone to get to your house to deal with the problem. The other public utilities (electric, gas, phone) understand that they need to deal with service problems immediately.  The cable TV industry never learned that lesson.  They cheap out on having enough service people.  One year, my service went down about two weeks before the Super Bowl.  I couldn't get a service appointment until after the big game.  ARGGH!

The other thing that the cable TV companies all seem to do is miss these long awaited appointments or show up hours later than promised.  Nothing better than having to take time off from work, then wait around the house for an expected on-time serviceman only to have the guy show up either not at all or hours late.  

I've relocated for business a number of times and each time I've tried the local cable TV company, thinking "this time it will be different."  Maybe in this city, the cable TV company will be better.  NOT!  Each time I've switched away from them to another TV provider - usually satellite.

These two different industries do not treat their customers like customers.  Once they've got you, they adopt a "you need us more than we need you" attitude and it permeates everything they do that touches their customers.  They focus on getting your business but once they have it, they take advantage of you rather than service you.

As you evaluate your company's customer service efforts, learn from the grossly unacceptable practices of the credit card and cable TV people.  Never play GOTCHA with your customers. Treat them just as importantly AFTER you have them as when you're trying to win their business.

Are You Doing Enough to Nurture Your Sales Leads?

I'm familiar with a number of B2B companies that do a terrible job managing sales leads once they get them. The focus of the marketing team is almost exclusively on generating leads that can be passed on to the sales team. Generating leads is clearly a key marketing task in B2B enterprises, but if your marketing team is spending most of its time generating leads instead of managing leads, you're in trouble.

Most sales teams are expected to convert leads into sales RIGHT NOW. This month and this quarter. The sales team is probably operating with monthly and quarterly quotas that directly impact their paychecks. It is not reasonable to expect the sales team to have a long-term focus, which is what is required to nurture and develop sales leads and eventually turn them into customers. If the marketing team hands 100 leads to the sales team and only 20 of those leads are ready to buy RIGHT NOW, what happens to the other 80?

If I'm a sales guy, I want more of those "RIGHT NOW" leads. The heck with those 80 that need nurturing and time to develop. I've got my monthly quota and that mortgage payment I need to make.

It's the job of your marketing team to "own" those 80 leads that need to be nurtured. If your marketing team is not actively managing those 80 leads, you're missing a huge opportunity AND you're wasting a lot of time and money. Do you have marketing campaigns designed to nurture these 80 leads and develop them to the point where they are ready to buy RIGHT NOW? If your marketing team is not developing, testing, measuring and implementing programs designed to nurture existing leads, shame on you! If they are spending all their time generating those 100 leads, just so 80 of them can be ignored, shame on you! That's marketing insanity.  You're effectively wasting 80 cents of every dollar you're investing in lead generation activities.

In today's economic climate, when many purchase decisions are being postponed or scrutinized more carefully than ever, it is especially important to have an active and effective Nurturing Effort in place. If I've told you I'm a potential customer and you then ignore me to chase after only RIGHT NOW prospects, the odds are that you will NEVER get my business.  

Pay attention to those 80 leads now, when they're not quite ready to buy, but when they still need and want help in making their purchase decision.  Nurture them.  You'll benefit later.

Marketing Lessons from the Obama Campaign

Today we have a new president-elect.  

What marketing lessons can we learn from Obama's victory?   One disclaimer is in order:  I consider myself politically independent.  I've voted for Democrats and Republicans, so I've go no political axe to grind.  These are simply the opinions of an interested observer who happens to know something about smart marketing.

1. Have a Purple Cow product:  Has there ever been a more unique candidate for the Presidency?  No one needed to invent or "spin" or convince anyone of Obama's uniqueness.  Some embraced it and some feared it.  But all recognized it.  He was a Purple Cow (see my earlier blog on Purple Cow thinking).
2. Identify a strong strategy and stick with it:  The Obama team had a very simple and easy to understand positioning strategy represented by one word:  CHANGE.  His campaign hammered the theme consistently and they didn't let Hillary Clinton or John McCain usurp it even though both tried.  His sub-theme "YES WE CAN"  conveyed optimism and self-confidence at a time when those qualities were exactly what the majority of Americans needed and wanted to feel.
3. Packaging is critical:  Obama always staged his major speeches and TV ads in settings that made him look "Presidential."  Regardless of whether you supported him, the staging of his Victory Speech last night was impressive.  He only won 51% of the popular vote yet it looked like he won a gigantic and overwhelming landslide.   Brilliant Packaging.
4. Re-position your competition:  Bush's current unpopularity was a huge problem for McCain.  He did all he could to distance himself from the President.  The Obama campaign  never conceded that issue and kept linking McCain to Bush, forcing McCain to be on the defensive and prove his independence.  You can't win by playing defense.  You need to score.
5. Seize opportunities quickly:  The economic crisis turned the campaign from a referendum on the War in Iraq to a Debate about Economic Recovery.  Bad luck for McCain, who had an advantage on foreign policy experience.  But the Obama campaign had the good sense to keep the debate focussed on the economy and McCain's depth of foreign policy experience became relatively unimportant.
6. Invest in marketing:  No matter how great your product is and how brilliantly it's positioned in the market, you won't succeed if you don't invest in marketing.

I hope that Obama's skills as a smart marketer foreshadow the skills he will show as our President.  If he's as good at running the country as he was at running his marketing campaign, we'll be in capable hands.  Let's all wish him well at this difficult time when our country needs exceptional leadership.

Brand Building - How the Little Things Add Up.

I confess.  I'm pretty much a Starbucks junky.  

It's hard for me to walk past one without wanting to go in and get a fix.  Partly, it's the coffee.  But a lot of the explanation for why I'm addicted to Starbucks is that I admire the way they've built their brand and I love to look for the new little things that they keep adding to the in-store experience.  Over the years, Starbucks has carefully and intelligently cultivated their brand and invested in it and built it one brick at a time.  It's now one of the most formidable and valuable brands on the planet.  Marketeers can all learn from observing Starbucks and watching not only what they do but how they do it.

Starbucks is a great real world example of "Purple Cow" thinking (a topic of an earlier Marketing Sanity blog posting).  "The Starbucks Experience:  5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary"  is a good book that outlines the guiding principles of the Starbucks brand.  The principles are:

1. Make It Your Own:  Are you old enough to remember when Maxwell House and Folger's owned the coffee business?  Starbucks re-invented it and has never looked back.
2. Everything Matters:  More on this principle in a minute.
3. Surprise and Delight:  Exceeding expectations.  It gets harder and harder to do, but somehow Starbucks keeps managing.
4. Embrace Resistance:  Listen and learn from the anti-Starbucks people.
5. Leave Your Mark:  Be a great corporate citizen.  Give back.  Care. 

Two recent developments at Starbucks have really caught my attention and both are great examples of both "Everything Matters" and "Surprise and Delight."  

The first and biggest is their strategic alliance with Apple and iTunes.  Every week at Starbucks you can collect a "Pick of the Week" card good for a free download of a song by a featured artist.  That's a $.99 value.  How cool is that?  Soon, you'll be able to do a one click download in the store onto your iPhone or iPod.  Hear something you like while you're enjoying your mocha?  Instant gratification.  Download it then and there.  This alliance is an obvious win-win for both companies on many levels.  It is definitely delighting in my book as a customer of both brands.

The second example is smaller but also surprising and delightful.  Recently, Starbucks has started a partnership with "Good" and begun distributing a weekly "Good Sheet".  Each weekly sheet is sponsored (so the cost to Starbucks is probably close to nil) and each features intelligent information about a thought provoking important issue of the day.  Just the thing to make me and a friend spend an extra few minutes in the store looking it over, discussing the issue and maybe ordering that second latte.  

These two new additions to the Starbucks brand are polar opposites from a technology standpoint:  one is digital and one is newsprint.  Yet they  both enhance the Starbucks brand and the in-store experience.  

As you're taxed with building your brand, in addition to all the big "important" things like ads and packaging and PR, think about all the little things you can do to surprise and delight your customers.  Then do them.  Commit to them.  Add them to your brand's experience.  Collectively, they will turn your brand into something unique and wonderful and very very valuable. 

Microtargeting - Political Marketing Tool That's Either Creepy or Cool - Decide for Yourself

Our national elections are less than three weeks away and we're all being bombarded with political marketing messages.  

I've you're like me, you find most of these highly packaged and super slick messages that are being pushed at us to be a terrible way to elect our leaders.  The issues of the day are highly complex and none of them have simple solutions.  If they did, they wouldn't still be issues would they?  They'd have been solved long ago.  No politician has all the answers even though they all claim that they do.  In the real world, no one likes or trusts a know-it-all.  Why do politicians think they need to pretend they have all the answers and then claim that their opponent is a clueless idiot?  One day a really honest straight-talking politician will hit the scene and take the country by storm.   

I want a politician who will tell me what they believe and how they think.  I don't want a spin-sensitive, word-smithing, equivocating, double-talker who's just looking to tell me what he or she thinks I want to hear.  

The October 2008 issue of "Fast Company" reports on the state-of-the-art marketing tool being used today by all the sophisticated campaign managers and politicians.  It's called microtargeting.  It's a database tool that enables campaign managers to identify undecided voters, learn what is important to them and then target specific messages that will sway them to vote for their candidate.

Here's a quote from the "Fast Company" story:  "We've come up with 30 major DNA strands within the electorate, such as soccer moms, Nascar dads, evangelical earth stewards, country-club Republicans, married-to-their mortgage families.  Then we say, 'These people need war-on-terror messages, these people need education messages, these people need tax messages.'"

This is just good old marketing 101, right?  Identify your target market, learn what's important to them and then deliver a product that satisfies their needs.  Nothing wrong with that.  Or is there?

Maybe I'm too old school, but I'm bothered by the idea of candidates as "products" with features that can be manipulated depending on what microtargeting dictates.   I'd like to think I'm electing someone with principles and ideals that will drive the decisions they make and what they do while they're in office.  How can I determine what a candidate is really all about when they're using microtargeting to tell me just what I want to hear?  It's hard enough to cut through all the bologna in election campaigns as it is.  

If a candidate is trying to cater messages to all 30 of these "major DNA strands" how can I understand their real priorities?  Maybe this is just smart modern day political marketing.  Or maybe this is one of the things that's now fundamentally wrong with the way we elect our political leaders.  

What do you think?

The Marketing Bull's-Eye

There's an amazing lack of continuity in most marketing campaigns today.  Instead of running for years and building equity and gaining power with repeated exposure, most of today's "campaigns" seem to be as perishable as yesterday's fresh cut flowers.  It's dumb marketing because it turns those marketing dollars from "investment" into "cost."  And in today's environment, every good senior executive is looking to cut costs.  The result?  Good-bye marketing.

Why aren't more marketing campaigns developed and used for the long-term?  

One reason is the incredible turnover in senior level marketing executives today.  The new sheriff in town almost always feels compelled to do their own thing and re-invent the wheel.  After all, the old marketing person was more than likely fired, so why stick with anything they developed?

But there's another reason why marketing campaigns don't last.  It's because they're not properly "sold in" to all of the important brand stake holders.  Broad-scale ownership of the campaign is not created and company-wide "buy in" is not achieved.  It becomes "the marketing department's campaign" instead of the company's campaign and that's usually the kiss of death.

Think of all of the brand's stake holders as concentric rings of an expanding circle - like a bull's-eye.  As you create and develop a new campaign, you must persuade an ever growing list of brand stake holders that the campaign is excellent enough to earn their support and long-term commitment.

Let's start at the center of the bull's-eye and move out.  

The first stake holder that you need to convince is yourself.  Is this campaign good enough that you're willing to bet your job on it?  To advocate it to all the other brand stake holders and put your neck on the block if it doesn't work?  Can you sell it to others with passion and conviction?  Is it right for the company and the brand and does it represent a "BIG IDEA" that can last and last and last?  

The next group of stake holders (the second ring of the bull's-eye) is the rest of the marketing team (including your agency partners).  Do they share your conviction?  Are they behind the campaign, too?  If not, why not?  Do they have real reasons that need to be addressed or bogus reasons because they're simply too whimpy to take a stand? Addressing real concerns will strengthen the idea further and make it better and that's what you need to do.  You'll generate idea ownership and you can then move out to the next stake holder ring of the marketing bull's-eye.

It's the sales organization - both your internal sales team and your distributors and channel partners.  Their enthusiasm is priceless.  Their apathy is death.  Do not understate the need to win this group over.  Do not wait to involve them in the campaign until it's too late to change it.  Your mindset needs to be that every stake holder group can add value and help strengthen the idea.  When they help create the final campaign, they own it and that ownership helps give the idea the power to last.  

The next stakeholder ring is the rest of your co-workers.  The sell-in should not stop with sales and marketing.  Every other department in your company should ideally be enthusiastic about the campaign.  Take the time to turn everyone in your company into brand and campaign ambassadors.

Only after this "internal" sell-in process is complete are you really ready to take your campaign to its intended target.  Make sure you have your measurement tools in place and as you identify ways you need to improve the initial campaign, celebrate that learning as a good thing.  No one should expect immediate perfection.  A great campaign will be a growing living thing.  Strong at birth but a behemoth after a few years of TLC and fine-tuning.  

The CMO's role is to evaluate all campaign input along the way, weed out the bad from the good, keep the BIG IDEA from being watered down and turned to mush, but be open-minded enough to recognize when good input is received and then courageous enough to embrace it and implement it.  The result will be a campaign that your entire business enterprise "owns" and an invaluable long-term business investment for your company.  Not to mention job security and enhanced market value for you.  Being the originator of a well-recognized and highly successful long-term marketing campaign is one of the most powerful career enhancers you'll ever have. You will have hit the Marketing Bull's-eye!

 

Two Books All Marketing People Need to Read

Here are two books that I think every marketer should not only read but have on their desks as every day references.

The first is "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin.  

The premise of Seth's great little book is that in today's world, you're either remarkable or you're invisible.  It's not enough to take some product or service, slap some marketing lipstick on it and consider the job done.  Marketing people must be engaged deeply in the product, packaging and service development process to insure that something about the product, packaging or service is TRULY and REALLY remarkable.  If marketing is brought in after these things are already finalized, your product development process is broken and needs to be fixed. 

We all know that most new products fail.  The reason is not usually poor marketing.  The real reason is that the new product is simply not remarkable enough to make it.  How high is the new product bar at your company?  Are you shooting for "remarkable'?  Are your new products buzzworthy?  REALLY buzzworthy?  If not, you've got a real uphill battle on your hands to achieve new product success.  

Are you also developing remarkable marketing programs for these hopefully remarkable products and services?  Or are you doing the same old tired things and hoping for the best? Unless you have a track record of remarkable new products launched with remarkable marketing, you need to get way outside your usual comfort zone and challenge everyone involved to adopt "Purple Cow" thinking as an integral part of your product development and marketing process.  

The second book is "Jeffrey Gitomer's Sales Bible."

Marketing people work with sales people for their entire career.  In many companies, there's a friction between the two functions.  Typically, this is because the leaders of the functions aren't working well as teammates and, as a result, the people in each area don't fully understand the mutual dependency that exists.  Each group blames the other for any lack of success and each group thinks they are more important or superior to the other.

Jeffrey Gitomer's fun book is a must read for all marketing people.  You will come away from his book with not only a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the sales function but also a much improved understanding about how to improve your own personal selling skills.  You'll also learn a tremendous amount about what makes great sales people great.  You'll learn how to recognize the great ones that work with you and, hopefully, you'll also learn how to help the not-so-great ones get better.

Google Seth Godin and Jeffrey Gitomer.  Sign up for their newsletters.  Read their books.   You'll be delighted by the fresh insight each provides.   And...you'll become a better marketer in the process.

Changing a Brand: Usually a Very Bad Idea

This blog entry is about the foolhardiness of deciding you need to fundamentally change the identity of a strong brand. By "strong" I mean a brand that has managed to stand for something distinctive and unique, even if that "something" may be polarizing or limiting in some way.

The bogus logic behind deciding to change strong brands usually goes something like this.

* "The Brand is strong but we need to broaden it in order to capture new markets/new customers that are not part of the brand's audience today." This is the GREED reason.
* "The Brand has new competitors that are more broadly positioned and those competitors are growing faster than we are. We need to respond." This is the FEAR reason.
* "The Brand is not relevant to enough people today. What was OK once is not OK now." This is the COP OUT reason.

First of all, if you're fortunate enough to be managing a strong brand, give thanks to the Career Gods. Strong brands are rare as diamonds and just as valuable. If you inherent one, your job is to nurture and protect it. Your job is definitely NOT to change it. The change agents will be everywhere. Your job is to fight them off. Why? Because the absolutely hardest thing to do in marketing is to change someone's mind. If I think "X" and you try to convince me of "Y", good luck to you. Maybe a friend or someone I really trust and respect MIGHT be able to get me to change my mind. But doing it with an ad or some other marketing tool? Not a chance.

Let's say the strong brand you're managing has acquired its identity over 20, 30 or maybe even 50 or 100 years. That's a lot of accumulated marketing that you're now going to try to "change." The only way you're going to be successful is if your company is prepared to keep with the "change" program for the next 10 or 20 years.

The most likely outcome in these situations is that you muddle your brand's previously precise and strong identity, begin to confuse and alienate your brand loyalists, waste a lot of money and time, and (more than likely) experience worsening business results followed by unemployment.

There is almost NEVER a good reason to change a strong brand in any fundamental way. The GREED and FEAR reasons are both lazy marketing solutions to the need to introduce a new brand or brands designed to broaden your company's overall business. The COP OUT reason is really just an acknowledgment that your recent marketing of your strong brand has probably sucked.

Here are two examples of brands that have been working hard at changing; Mercedes Benz and Gold's Gym. I content that both are worse off now than before.

Mercedes fell prey to the GREED reason. They extended the brand into lower priced cars to broaden it and increase its overall market share. The result? Lexus has surpassed Mercedes in both perceived and ACTUAL quality.

Gold's Gym fell prey to GREED, FEAR and COP OUT reasons. New competitors had more all-family and female appeal than the hardcore serious fitness image that Gold's Gym owned. Rather than respond with a new brand, they decided to change Gold's, even going so far as considering dropping the "Gym" from its name. The result? An increasingly muddled image and a me-too fitness club experience.

The only success that I can think of is Cadillac. GM had successfully changed the brand's image by making fundamental changes in the Cadillac products, in its target market and in its marketing AND, it has taken years and lots and lots of money. This is the exception that proves the rule.

If you've got the money and the will and the time (and the product news) to be like Cadillac, go for it! If not, resist the urge to change. Make the most of what you've got. If you need more, create and build new brands that get the job done. Don't wreck the good thing that you already have.

Your Brand Could Be Hijacked - Get Ready!

In the good old days, when your company inadvertently disenfranchised a customer by some tacky bit of poor service or poor product performance, there wasn't much they could do.  The really angry customers would simply stop doing business with you.   If you were lucky, an aggravated customer would send a complaint letter or email or make a call to your customer service desk.   Customers like these were providing both incredibly valuable feedback to your business as well as giving you a chance to remedy their problem so they could continue to do business with you.   If you mishandled this golden opportunity, only the disgruntled customer generally knew about it and the worse that could happen is that you lost them as a customer.

In today's world, the downside of creating angry disgruntled poorly-handled customers is much greater.  That's because it's not just between you and them anymore.  Now, customers have the power and the ability to literally inform the world about how poorly your company or one of your brands has performed and how badly your people have responded.  

In today's world, BEWARE THE TECH-SAVVY DISGRUNTLED CUSTOMER!  They can hijack your brand.  They can dominate the Internet conversation about your brand.  All it takes is one really angry and highly motivated tech-savvy brand pirate and your goose could be cooked.

The Internet is the tool.  Anti-brand blogs and text messaging can be powerful but the real brand killer is video.  

Image the following marketing nightmare.   One of your customers records and uses their cell phone to video tape a particularly idiotic and callous encounter between them and someone from your company.   The video (because it's either funny or outrageous) finds its way on to YouTube and then starts showing up on emails and on other social networking sites.  People who may have had similar experiences with your company appear out of the woodwork and jump into the exploding and negative Internet conversation that's happening about your brand.  Your brand is being "flamed."  Are you paying attention?  Are you aware this is even happening?  Are you prepared to do something about it?  Or are you asleep at the switch as millions of dollars of your marketing investment go up in smoke?

Even if you don't experience this type of brand nightmare, there is still an Internet conversation going on about your brand.  It's happening right now.  Are you plugged into it?  Are you tracking it and using it to understand what is being said and thought about your brand?  Are you using it to gain brand insight?

You must recognize and embrace the idea that you are no longer in complete control of your brand.  Viral transmission and re-transmission of messages can propagate negative information FAST.  Is your company ready to deal quickly with information like this that gets out there? Do you have a company blog that you can use as a communication tool to combat this kind of thing?  Do you have a PR response plan ready to implement?  Is your marketing team empowered to respond FAST when these situations occur?

If you don't, you've got a time bomb on your hands.  The clock is ticking.  What are you waiting for?

Marketing Metrics - Meaning vs. Misery

It's amazing to me how many otherwise intelligent companies don't invest any money to adequately measure the impact of their marketing programs.  The logic goes something like this....the marketing budget is too small to enable us to afford any marketing research...we need to put all our money to work on programs and not waste it on research...we've never done research like this in the past and we don't need it now....there are too many other important things that we need to fund in this year's budget....we don't need this type of research because we use our sales results (or input from our sales force) to determine if our marketing programs are working.

Sound familiar?  If so, it's more marketing insanity at work.  

The result of this type of thinking is an often catastrophic situation where someone's "opinion" (usually a heavy breather like the CEO or CFO) determines what marketing programs get funded.  These same C-level opinionators (I know there's no such word) also determine whether the top marketing exec is doing a good job or not.  If you happen to be that top marketing person, you are in big trouble.  You better measure or you're headed for misery.

In today's metrics-management business world, it is imperative that marketing metrics be clearly defined and measured with regularity.  The information needs to be relevant and useful so that marketing programs can be evaluated and fine-tuned (or scrapped) based on what is learned.  

It's Marketing 101.  Start by clearly defining the objectives of your marketing efforts.  Define these objectives in terms of the things that marketing can directly impact.  For example in a B2B company, marketing has an indirect impact on sales, but it has a very direct impact on leads generated (both quantity and quality).  It also has a very direct impact on the awareness of your company and its products and services among with your target audience(s).    It has a direct impact on the perception and attitudes that prospects hold.  (Your customers opinions and perceptions are the result of first hand experience with your company but your prospects have opinions and perceptions based largely on your marketing).

It's very possible that marketing is working great (generating high-quality leads, increasing awareness, moving perceptions in a positive direction) but that something else inside the company is falling short and THAT is the reason why sales aren't improving.  Maybe the sales team is dropping the ball.  Or the products or pricing are flawed in some way.  Can you tell?  Do you know?  Or is it "opinion time" when the executive team sits around and tries to figure out what is going on?

Most marketing people love to create programs and they want to spend their time doing that, but it's the road to marketing misery.  You've got to fight to measure the impact of your programs.  Even if your overall budget is small.  I would argue ESPECIALLY if your marketing budget is small.  

Measuring your programs creates meaning and purpose and effectiveness and accountability and (if they're working) some measure of job security.  Failure to measure is insanity, leading to finger-pointing, guesswork, ignorance and probably unemployment. 

Stop Thinking Like an Advertiser and Start Thinking Like a Brand Programmer

The classic ad model is quickly dying.  

Cable TV started to kill it by dramatically increasing our viewing options and making it easy to zap ads and switch channels.  The Internet is finishing off the job because TV is no longer the only place you can use video to communicate about your brand.  Everyone now has the web.  It's easy to use video on your brand's web site.  In fact, you can create whatever web programming you want.  You're not interrupting anything with an ad.  You're now conveying information (or branded infotainment) that people have surfed their way to your web site to find.  You are no longer an advertiser.  You are now a brand programmer.   Big difference!

As a brand programmer you're free from all those constraints that "advertisers" face.  The big one being the limitation to thirty seconds (or sixty if you've got the big bucks).   Hey, it's your web site.  Those videos can be any length you want.  But long videos cost too much money to produce I hear someone saying.  Not necessarily.  You can spend a fortune or you can spend almost nothing.  That's a marketing decision based on what you think your brand requires.  The most popular viral videos from the web are home-made and that's a big part of their charm.  They are not slick and they are not overly produced and people can't get enough of them.  They're real and that makes them believable and (potentially) persuasive.

Research  techniques that play a large role in shaping TV ads at many companies are not relevant for web-based video.   The research tools that have been used for years to measure and evaluate TV ads don't apply to web-based brand video.  All those research-driven "do's and don'ts" can be tossed right out the window, too.  How liberating for brand communicators!  And how scary.  No rules.  No road maps.  A blank palette where brilliant creativity can flourish and where lame creativity has no excuse to exist.  

But this new world requires a new mindset among marketers and "advertisers."  An ad created for traditional TV is not likely to work on the web.  New thinking and new approaches are required.   Similarly, if you've never been a TV-driven marketing company, you now need to move into the world of video production and become a brand programmer for your web site.   There are many small B2C and many B2B companies that have NEVER considered video as a brand communication tool.  Today, this is just silliness.  If you've got a web site, you've got a platform to use brand video as a marketing tool.   

The Secret Weapon of All Smart Marketing Companies - Their People

How many times have you personally been snagged by some marketing campaign or another only to walk away without buying anything because when you actually came into personal contact with the company, you were turned off or disappointed by the experience?

You call a phone number and get one of those maddeningly impersonal phone trees that make all of us want to hang up.  You walk into a store and the sales people either ignore you, act like they're angry about something or they know nothing about what you're interested in.  You send an email and no one responds or the response is not helpful.

Earlier in my career when I was in the agency business, we did a research project for a client that was desperately seeking some way to differentiate themselves from bigger competitors with stronger national customer service reputations.  We uncovered a gem for them.  The single best thing they could do to stand out, according to their prospects, was to eliminate their automated phone answering system and move to live operators.  The client choose not to listen to the research.  Why?

Because the phone system, despite it being the most intense customer contact tool they had, was not considered "marketing."  The phone system and everything to do with it was part of "operations."  It was cheaper NOT to have live operators.  It was also insane marketing.

The best ads, web sites, promotions, direct marketing and PR can all be undone by one knucklehead on the phone or in the store.  Conversely, mediocre traditional marketing can be overcome with great personal service.  Word-of-mouth is the best advertising.  And the best way to generate it is with incredible personal one-to-one service.  

The smartest marketers realize that and they make sure that the marketing team is either in charge of or deeply involved with all decisions related to any type of customer contact.  It's marketing insanity to consider your customer contact people and systems "operations."  Your people can and should be the most important marketing tool your company has.  If you're not thinking this way, it's time to start.

All your customer contact people should be Brand Ambassadors, capable of preaching the marketing gospel of your brand to anyone they come into contact with.  It's not that hard.  It only takes the right kind of recruiting (are you listening HR?) and the right kind of ongoing training, reward and retention system.  For models, look at companies like Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and Nordstrom's.

Is it smarter to spend more of your budget on more marketing stuff?  Or is it smarter to spend more of your budget training (and then retaining) your customer contact people to be the best brand ambassadors they can be?  

 

Olympic TV Ads: The Gold Medals and the Insanity Awards

If you're like me, you've been spending quite a bit of time watching the Beijing Olympics, from the incredible opening ceremony to Michael Phelps amazing eight gold medals to Dana Torres (at 41) competing with swimmers half her age to the Dream Team to the Chinese gymnasts (some of those girls were definitely under age!) to the lightening fast Usain Bolt from Jamaica.  All this Olympic wonderfulness is brought to us courtesy of those wealthy companies with enough money to run their TV ads during the games.  And since my last blog was about the importance of brilliance if you're going to invest in TV ads, I thought it might be fun to take a few minutes to assess some of those ads we've all been watching during the games.

Gold Medal Winners

1. Audi:  They illustrate their "Progress is Beautiful" theme in a visually compelling way by transfixing us on a living room as it evolves and changes and grows more beautiful over the years.  The final touch that makes the ad brilliant is the pan to the driveway where a Mercedes "progresses" into a new Audi A4.  
2. Nationwide:  Their "Accident Forgiveness" message is cleverly reinforced by showing an older couple who are on the wrong end of a parking lot mishap being VERY unforgiving to the poor young guy who accidentally and gently side-swipes their old car.  The old lady beats the snot out of the guy with her purse while her husband eggs her on.  "Hit him in the head, Rose."  Too funny.  However, I have to give Nationwide serious style point deductions for over-running this one spot.  Way too much of a good thing.  Especially considering the core idea of this ad lends itself to so many other situations.
3. Budweiser:  They've been running lots of different spots but only one really stands out.  The Dalmation training the rejected Clydesdale so he can earn a spot on the team next year.  The Rocky theme music is used perfectly and the payoff is great.  Fantastically clever way to put their tried and true brand icons to work and generate a major warm & fuzzy feeling for the brand.  

Silver Medal Winners

1. Target:  Catchy spot with two college roommates decorating their dorm room with stuff bought at Target.  Cool music and both girls dance great.  Impossible to not watch.  Fun and the back-to-school timing of the Olympics is perfect for the message.
2. VISA:  Their understated but very elegant "Go World" spots do a great job of capturing the emotional specialness that is the Olympics.  They also have done a number of spots timed exactly to the events of that Olympic day.  The timeliness makes the spots all the more compelling.
3. Chevy/GM:  Like Bud, they've been running lots of ads and most are very mediocre and easily forgettable.   However, one truly stands out.  It's called "Progress" and it illustrates the evolution of a gas station (and the Chevy cars and trucks that use it) in a pristine mountain setting.  The spot ends where it starts - with no gas station and just the pristine setting.  The reason?  Chevy is developing a car for the future called the Volt that won't need gas.  More ads like this and GM might not be in such trouble.
4. GE:  I found three of their ads memorable and compelling.  The first was the "eco-imagination" ad that focused on GE's jet engines using amazing imagery of island birds, with the cute trick of having them lined up runway style waiting for a parade of baby sea turtles to cross on their way to the ocean.  The next two both had to do with GE's healthcare products.  One was a wonderful little love story between a young handsome Chinese street vendor and the pretty intern.  The second was another nice story featuring an Indian doctor delivering care to a remote village thanks to GE products.

The Insanity Award Winners (So Bad That Someone Needs to Lose Their Job)

1. Lenovo:  A series of spots that are utterly unrelated to their product.  The one that is the most interesting to watch features hundreds of sumo wrestlers coming together in the street, assuming the shape of a plane, picking up speed as they march down the street and then taking off.  Every time I see it, I'm thinking "what airline is this for" and then there's some inane Lenovo message at the end that I still haven't heard or understood.
2. Subway:  A promotion spot for their Scrabble game that shows people getting so excited that they spill their soft drinks on everyone else at the restaurant.  Yeah.  Right.  How dumb is this?  Nothing fun about this.  Just stupid.  

The Mediocrity Awards

There are lots of other Olympic advertisers who are spending seriously big bucks to get noticed and who are running ads that are plain vanilla - not awful but definitely not brilliant.  Just so middle of the road that it's sad.  It's a shame that all these smart companies couldn't do better. Here's my list:  McDonald's, J&J, AT&T, Nissan, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Panasonic, VW, ExxonMobil, Home Depot, United and Hilton.  

Brilliant athletic performance like we get to see during the Olympics ought to be supported by brilliant advertising performance, too. 

Brilliance: The Only TV Advertising Strategy That Makes Sense

I've been in the advertising and marketing communications profession my entire adult life, so I should be more attuned than your average joe to the ads that are running on TV these days.  So how come I have such a hard time remembering even one or two TV ads (any ads!) that I saw on the tube last night?  I'm not alone in this.  I often ask people two questions to see how much impact the latest crop of TV spots are having on them:  1)  did you watch any TV last night? and 2) if so, can you recall any of the ads (just one) that you saw?  Most people CAN'T RECALL EVEN ONE AD!!  Yikes.  

We all know why this is happening.  Viewing options have exploded.  Zapping commercials is easier than ever.  And, let's be honest, the ads are usually either not personally relevant (so why pay attention?) or they are just plain uninteresting, boring or too obtuse to make their point in a memorable way.  

If you're an advertiser spending the big bucks on a national TV schedule, this means you have three choices:  1) spend your marketing money some other way, 2) pony up enough bucks so that your media frequency is high enough that you can pound your mediocre TV ads into our brains (who other than the Pharma companies have this kind of money today?) or 3) put on your big boy pants and demand that your marketing and advertising team create nothing short of BRILLIANT TV ads before you commit to a TV-driven national media plan.

Brilliant TV ads are uncommon for a reason.  Even the best and brightest advertising pros in the world typically only have a FEW examples of true brilliance in their portfolios.  Why is that?  Brilliant TV ads require insightful innovative strategies (rare) executed by creative people who are capable of developing BIG IDEAS (even rarer), a client who is capable of recognizing a potentially brilliant idea and has the guts to go for it without researching it to death and watering it down (rarer still), AND exceptional production (casting, direction, editing, etc)  to bring it to life (also rare).  The odds are not good.  99% of the time, all of this doesn't happen and we get what we have today:  communication mediocrity that is wasting a huge amount of money.

So, is it marketing insanity to shot for TV brilliance?  Maybe.  But when it does happen, you will have created something with magical marketing power.  Brilliant TV ads not only work now, they work FOREVER.  People remember brilliance for the rest of their lives.  What kind of marketing ROI is that?  Off the charts!

If you're going to do TV,  in today's media world you've got to go for BRILLIANCE unless you're Pharma rich and can afford to pound it out.  Be aware of what it takes and how hard it is to achieve.  Hire the best.  Listen to what they say.  Hold them accountable.  And set the bar high. Let them know only BRILLIANCE will make you happy.  

All Those Unmanaged Web Sites Out There

Is there anyone in business today who disagrees that having a vibrant appealing web site is now an absolute "Must Have"?

It's the first place a potential prospect or employee or strategic business partner goes to learn about a company.  It's the first place they go to evaluate you versus your competition. Remember that old saying "You only have one chance to make a good first impression"?  Well, today, that first impression is made by your web site.  In fact, today, I'd argue that it's your web presence OVERALL and not just your web site that is making that critical first impression. Your company is being googled and whatever shows up on that first page of a google search represents your company in today's digital interconnected universe.

When is the last time you googled your own company or brand?  Try it.  Be a secret shopper for an afternoon and pretend you know next to nothing about your company and/or brand.  Google it.  Do you like what you see?    Do you see things that you'd like to change and improve?  Is your SEM and SEO what it should be?

Now, here's the $64,000 question....do you have anyone in your organization whose primary job is to manage the internet presence of your company and/or brand?  If not, WHY NOY? How easy is it for you to make changes to your web site and actively manage your web presence?   Companies and their senior executives generally get all hot and bothered about building or rebuilding a web site and then they check it off the "to do list" and move on to the next project. That's insanity.  Whenever I revisit a web site and see that it is exactly the way it was the last time I looked, I conclude two things:  1)no one is paying attention and 2) this company doesn't get it.  They are not a sophisticated marketing communicator and probably not a very well run business.  In some cases these are probably erroneous perceptions, but perception is reality.  The point is that if you, as a senior marketing or corporate executive, are ignoring your web presence or attending to it only periodically, you are ignoring a critically vital aspect of your company.

Your web presence is NOT a project or a part-time job.  It is a strategically vital dynamic communication platform that is probably more important than every other communication tool in your marketing arsenal.  It merits full time attention .  It is never "DONE".  It is a work in progress that should be evaluated, measured and managed every single day.  

If your company is not paying enough attention to its web presence, shame on you.  Start!  It's marketing insanity not to.

How's Your Company's Marketing IQ?

The economy really sucks.  Stock prices are way down.  Fuel prices are way up.  And this guy Obama looks like he's going to be our next President.  CEOs are scared.  Their personal portfolios are suffering.  The Board is antsy.  Revenues and profits are down. What's a CEO to do?  Why, fire people, of course, and cut costs like crazy.  Here's a typical CEO thought bubble "The future be damned.  I've got to save myself NOW."  Here's a novel idea that rarely seems to occur to our titans of industry:  cut costs somewhere OTHER THAN marketing.  Rather than marketing being the first department to take the hit, the sagest executives should view marketing as the last place they want to cut.  

Too many supposedly savvy CEOs fall prey to the same disease when times are tough.  It's called Slashitis.  Its symptoms are a panicky need to slice costs right NOW in order to preserve:  1) company EBITDA and 2) the CEO's own personal continued employment (hate to see those big paychecks stop showing up in the bank account).  In many companies, a good dose of cost-cutting is often good medicine.  It's easier for an organization to get fat and complacent when things are going well.  Tough times force companies to take a hard look at their cost structure and make "adjustments" that are often overdue.  It's business Darwinism - mutate or become extinct.  It's survival of the fittest.  

But too often, the marketing department and its budgets are wrongly targeted for the most drastic cuts.  Generally, a cutback in marketing doesn't hurt you today or even tomorrow. Just like it takes time for marketing to work.  It takes time for the lack of marketing to hurt.  If your company has a well-managed marketing department, your marketing investment (notice the word investment) should be laying the foundation for future success and prosperity. Marketing's mission is to build brand preference, create a predisposition to buy and generate prospects for the sales team.  All are absolutely core tasks in any well run company.  Under what economic conditions (short of imminent collapse of the entire enterprise) does it ever make sense to NOT be doing these things?

If marketing is viewed as only a cost (not an investment) then it is far easier and far more justifiable to cut its budgets and its people.  Marketing should never be just a cost.  If it's viewed that way, it's for two reasons.  Either the CMO has done a poor job of developing marketing metrics that document the effectiveness of the company's marketing programs OR the CEO is simply out-to-lunch when it comes to understanding how imperative marketing is to a healthy well-run business.

This later statement may seem extreme, but I have seen many companies where the CEO is literally clueless about marketing.  You've seen these companies, too.  Here are seven deadly signs of a company (and a CEO) with low Marketing IQ.  

1. A history of non-marketing executives in the CMO job.  If the CMO role is routinely being filled by a sales exec or an operations exec or (heaven help it) a finance exec, you know this is likely to be a company with low Marketing IQ.
   
2. A history of no one at all in the CMO role.  Duh.
   
3. A lack of even the most basic marketing metrics.  What are they measuring?  If they're not measuring it, you know no one is really managing it.  Another sure sign of low Marketing IQ.
   
4. A marketing staff that has no idea how to set objectives, develop plans and measure progress.  If everyone is focussed on a marketing task or two, but no one can define overall objectives or show you an overall plan, this is another sign of low Marketing IQ.
   
5. A total DIY marketing mentality.  If everything has always been done "in house" you better look out.  Another sign of low Marketing IQ.
   
6. No customer or product research.  This is like trying to drive a car blindfolded.  No information is another sign of low Marketing IQ.
   
7. Dull middle-of-the-road boring totally forgettable marketing communication materials.  "Safe" is the riskiest marketing approach of all.  If the company is not doing anything that stands out, it's another sure sign of low Marketing IQ.

I hope your company is different and shows none of these signs.  I hope you've got a marketing savvy CEO with a high Marketing IQ who's hired a strong CMO.  I hope that this rotten economy is not causing your company to abandon marketing in the interest of short term profit.  If not, my advice is to polish up that resume because you're on a losing team.