Alternative marketing thinking

Visitors to last week’s New York International Auto Show were in for a surprise. While there were gleaming automobiles all over, the Ford display was conspicuously different. The Ford Taurus on display looked like it had been involved in a crash. It had a crumpled hood and half of the front bumper missing (More pictures here). Ford intentionally crashed the vehicle in a test facility to show consumers how well the 2008 Taurus — and by extension, the rest of its vehicles — can withstand a crash.

People are becoming more and more circumspect of advertising messages and technology is allowing people to avoid ads, so marketers need to devise new ways to catch people’s attention. “One of the problems that almost all the Detroit automakers have is breaking through the resistance that people have to even look at the cars,” said Art Spinella, of the automotive consulting firm CNW Marketing Research.

The Ford effort is not an isolated one. Starbucks, battling image problems, and the belief that their in-store experience is not as good as it used to be closed all their 7100 stores for three hours in the US to retrain its 135,000 staff. A visible act from Starbucks of showing the world that it is changing.

One of the problems with older physical brands is that they are caught up in the ‘tell and they will listen’ mode. There is an interesting post on Umair Haque’s HBR blog on how new age brands like Google talk less and listen more, which was rejoined by Millward Brown’s Nigel Hollis. In fact Nigel’s post tells us how brands like Google can actually show and not tell the world about their superior product, without using traditional advertising, because users experience the offering very easily.

Which brings us back to one of the most interesting thoughts that we discussed in the newsletter many weeks ago. From the Head of Zeus Jones. Adrian Ho had this wonderful post about the 85-15 point. Marketing focus versus brand impact. On how marketing is focused on a very small portion of the time a person interacts with a brand, about 15% or less, yet marketers spend most of their attention on getting this seemingly small bit right. Rather than focus on the 85%.

And finally to the point that in the changing world of marketing is customer service the new advertising? As illuminated by David Armano at the Ad Age, Digital Marketing Conference. And to this wonderful story of how Virgin went many miles to serve a customer who had forgotten his wallet on the check-in desk.