With the Detroit bailout now a wreck, the refrain from the impacted carmakers is that a the money is still necessary, because "consumers won't buy cars from companies in bankruptcy."
But they readily flew bankrupt airlines. For years. Still do.
Since 2000, most of the major airlines have traveled in and out of bankruptcy: United, US Airways, Delta, Northwest. Continental was a visionary in this regard, throwing up its corporate hands in 1990. Frontier is still in hock.
You'd think it would have had an impact on traveler willingness to step onto planes, right? Talk about all the questions bankruptcy might raise about the safety and reliability of airline performance. Airline branding wastes milions promoting routes and generic benefits of vacation happiness, but none of it would be tolerated (let alone work) unless would-be passengers felt safe.
And they did. And they do. So why wouldn't people buy cars from automakers in bankruptcy?
Is it the financial nut? A car is far more expensive than an airplane ticket. But you'd think the value of one’s life was far greater than any car purchase. Yet the airline brands didn't have any issues with getting paid. And what car buyer has any idea what they're paying anyway (monthly payments, whether for purchase or lease, are intended to obfuscate the total cost)?
Is it potential service? Again, the carmakers aren't responsible for service, per se, and there's no reason to believe that there wouldn’t be available support for any and all vehicle models on the road.
No, it's just that the argument is false.
Now, I know that the bailout nonsense has been unfair to the car companies, especially after financial firms got zillions with no strings attached. The supposed principled opposition from the GOP has come mostly from senators who have their own pet carmaker factories in their state backyards, who are hoping to do deadly damage to the Detroit competition (and are getting help in their home countries, too). Shame on them all.
But if people are willing to risk their lives flying on bankrupt airlines, I bet they'd buy cars from bankrupt automakers. Don't the proponents of the bailout need a better argument?
There's a legal squabble going on between Taco Bell and rapper 50 Cent over a faux letter the company sent out, asking that the celebrity change his name for a day to "79 Cent" -- the pricepoint of one of its value meals -- and earn $10,000 for the charity of his choice.
The gangsta star has sued for trademark infringement in federal court, and Taco Bell's lawyers are counter-blathering in the press. The marketing blogosphere is ripping with analyses ranging from the utterly brilliant to the foolishly stupid.
So which is it? A bright bulb publicity stunt in which everyone wins, or a mistake that'll backfire (whether on the company, for dreaming it up, or on 50 Cent, for taking it so seriously)?
I think it's a winner, however bluntly contrived the strategy might have been. Taco Bell can wax poetic about its brand but the reality is that the price is a key driver of sales. So getting that information out to people is a key, if not the key, purpose of its outbound marketing.
The faux letter, and 50 Cent's willingness to bite at the bait, accomplished that and more. Irrespective of how the lawsuit gets resolved, nobody can even reference it without mentioning the price thing. Taco Bell gets its point across, and 50 Cent gets to posture about defending his own brand...which gets him the added visibility he wants with his own target customers.
They're not in it together, but they're in it together. In publicity stunts like this, everyone wins, and the money involved will likely be anything but small change.
A quick check of the headlines and blogosphere reveals some very innovative approaches to 'rescuing' GM and its brethren in Detroit.
Most all of them forsake a cash bailout (or otherwise pecuniary reward) for various plans to remake the companies: management and the boards must resign, production lines must be obligated to make only hybrid vehicles. Probably all of the ideas involve putting many thousands of people out of work, whether explicitly or implicitly required.
So here's a dim bulb question for you: If you change the people and the products, what's left of the company? What would we be saving with our tax-payer dollars?
Certaintly, we're not talking about car companies anymore. Swap out the people and products, and you've got tangible assets (like factories and machines) and intangibles (designs and branding, for instance). As for the latter, I'm not sure the intangibles are worth much of anything, consideed in the light of any reasonable cost/benefit analysis of the companies' many billions spent on marketing. Attach a GM, Ford, or Chrysler badge to a vehicle, and its value increases by...what, anything? Or does it actually decline?
The very idea of rescuing these companies relies on there being some residual value to those names. It would require some miraculous re-engineering to find it, and I worry that the ultimate payoff might be the creation of differently-configured but otherwise identically incapable (or unneeded) car companies.
The factories and machines, however, have some tangible, depreciated value,. Couldn't they be repurposed to make products that a market might need? Solar panels, some other widgets, even floor polish. Who cares? If the punchline is to rescue jobs, the presumed rescuers should open their minds to how they achieve their goal.
A healthy first step would be to stop thinking about the companies as car brands. They're not; rather, they're businesses in search of a purpose. And profitability.
I enjoy Wired magazine when I'm done reading Fast Company, but this current month's issue left me wondering: where do the articles end, and the ads begin?
It's really a seamless merging of the two, at least to my uneducated eyes. Every page carries forward a design sensibility introduced on the first few pages. Quick...do the ads look like editorial, or the copy resemble ads?
The question remains unanswered now that I've flipped closed the back cover. All I remember are images at funny angles. Typefaces stretched, jumbled, and usually sans serif (which I miss, being an old guy). Text often times jarred, if not sometimes literally overwhelmed by imagery, with peripheral chaos surrounding the most data-dense pages.
A solid chunk of the magazine was occupied by product reviews, which reminded me of those paid-for sections in adverzines you get at the airport (or which appear in other publications with that mouseprint "special advertising section" as your only indication that what you're reading is commerical, not journalistic).
Everything in the magazine felt like it was intended to make me buy something, if not render me slightly agitated.
I know ad ubiquity is the trend online, whether via search results or the origins of much of the "conversational" content we experience. But does it help the purposes of advertising in a print magazine? Negatively impact the credibility of the journalism?
Is ad ubiquity in Wired a bright light or dim bulb idea?
You don't need to look far to see the challenges facing marketers today: consumers are more wary than they've been in years, and feel as though they have less latitude for spending than they did even a month ago ago. Credit and stock woes are forcing companies to cut back on everything, and critically scrutinize everything else.
Sales are down. Costs are up. Pressure on the top-line and bomttom-line equals a perfect storm. What's a marketer to do?
The latest examples of experimental creativity in brand marketing have centered on digital activities, such as social and viral campaigns. They've promised to deliver desirable eyeballs at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising (like broadcast TV), so many companies have shifted budgets to these channels. We’re going to see more of it positioned as a response to the challenges of our terrible business climate.
Only is it enough?
Not many clients or employers are going to tolerate us talking to our customers, engaging them, or otherwise spending ever-rarer company dollars distracting people while the rest the enterprise is focused (and dependent) on us selling them stuff. Investments in brand are fine and dandy, but the pressure of that perfect storm means that we need to see payoffs faster, better, and more often.
Or we're going to see those digital marketing budgets get slashed, just like their more expensive analog counterparts.
So would challenging our own conceptions of branding, and how we deliver it, be a bright or dim idea?
The global economic meltdown has been bad news for financial services brands, straining the media of marketing communications as much as balance sheets. The fundamental question is whether branding can overcome the rational as well as emotional reactions of depositors, investors, and policy holders.
For instance, WaMu, the largest failed savings & loan in U.S. history, suffered a massive run during the final week of its tumble into insolvency. The withdraw rate stabilized when Chase bought the bank, and then ran ads that declared "We love Chase. And not just because they have a trillion dollars."
So what mollified frightened customers? Was it the cute branding, or the news of the buyout?
Conversely, Bank of America has run no branding directed at Merrill Lynch account holders. Investment portfolios are a different animal than bank deposits (Merrill's liquidity crisis didn’t necessarily touch the value of stocks and bonds it held on customers' behalf), yet BofA's recent earnings announcement was greeted with a massive stock selloff.
Was the lack of branding an issue? Or is there simply no way to overpower the news, so why throw good money after bad?
The efficacy of branding requires some level of authority, and today's chaotic circumstances challenge that credibility...so I think the fundamental question remains unanswered: what can the financial brands say in a broad marketing sense that will add up to mean something to consumers?
Maybe Charles Schwab has the right idea. The firm seems to have forsaken the branding ads and opted to focus on direct communication to account holders, effectively telling them "we feel your pain, and we're willing to talk about it."
Is the best approach for financial brands to simply acknowledge the questions instead of declaring answers? Or does it matter at all?
Are the financial firms running branding ads bright lights, or dim bulbs?
Levi's has a significant problem: like many other iconic brands -- it's pretty much generically synonymous with the idea of "jeans" -- there's nowhere near the consumer behavior (i.e. purchases) to match consumer awareness.
So it has launched a viral e-card campaign, called "Unbutton the Beast," that features weird phallic characters spouting ersatz innuendo as they pop out of unzipped pants. Consumers can pick one of four characters -- a fish, lobster claw, rapper sock puppet, or some spindly dinosaur-looking thing -- and even customize it with their own voice before sending emails on to whomever deserves such, er, hilarity.
Such brazenly inappropriate campaigns serve a purpose, as Calvin Klein educated us with a baby Brooke Shields and her own jeans many moons ago. Brand experts will look to the coverage and conversation so prompted (like this post, for instance) as proof positive that such gestures make brand names "relevant" and "top of mind."
In a tough economy, this buzz should have some implications for moving jeans of off store shelves, or so the thinking goes. And the creative content jibes with the product..."unbutton" the button-down 501 jeans. Get it?
A counter argument isn't hard to make, however. The campaign is inane, not relevant whatsoever, does little to connect to a sales purpose and, thus, is utterly pointless.
Maybe pointlessness is the point? What's your vote? Bright light, or dim bulb?
