Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

The Case Against Perfection

Oranges are lefties. The fragrance of an orange comes from limonene, the same chemical that gives lemons their distinctive odor. However the molecular structure of an orange’s limonene is the mirror image of "right-handed" limonene in lemons. All of nature, from spinning electrons to spiraling galaxies, seems organized by left- and right-handed preferences.

Biasing entities toward the right or left is Nature's way of avoiding symmetry, indeed, of avoiding perfection. Natural diamonds are more scintillating than human-made diamonds because the latter are structurally perfect.

Perfection leaves no room for progress, thus inhibits evolution. Perfection, in fact, can lead to aberrant outcomes. For instance, manufactured drugs usually have an equal number of left and right biased molecules, giving them structural perfection. However, drug makers have learned to reduce side effects by endowing drugs with a molecular architecture that is biased to the right or left. It was thalidomide’s molecular perfection that caused the tragic birth defects associated with the drug.

Before Roger Sperry and Joseph Bogen’s Nobel Prize winning research that revealed functional specialization in each of the brain's hemispheres, many regarded the right hemisphere as largely redundant tissue. It was called "the minor brain. Now, of course, we know differently. The "right brain" is critical to our making sense of reality and many regard it as the soul of creativity.

Knowing something about how brains and the energized aura called the mind work leads to better marketing. After all, marketing is about getting information into people's brains and influencing their minds to take some action. Marketing messages with a right brain (emotional) bias often work better than marketing messages with left brain (rational) bias.

How Consumer Segmentation Can Be Counterproductive

An old hippie friend who enjoyed the ‘60s with great gusto once told me, “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”

Ever since marketing prof Wendell Smith introduced the idea of consumer segmentation to marketers in a 1956 edition of The Journal of Marketing, marketers have striven to follow Smith’s advice to excess.

On its face, segmenting consumers makes a lot of sense: save money, increase effectiveness by targeting only those consumers who are most likely prospects.

However, the process of segmentation is a process of exclusion. It discounts consumers who are not members of a target segment. And they might add up to being a sizeable number, even if not so similar to one another as to be neatly clusterable.

Harley-Davidson eschews segmentation, or at least is so subtle (not excessive) about it that you never sense that Harley prizes one category of consumer over another. The company avoids running ads in which you can tell the age of a biker poised on his (or maybe her) prized bike. Yes, often you cannot even tell the gender of the rider.

New Balance similarly makes people in its ads so indistinct that you can’t tell their age. This is one reason why New Balance, whose growth is outpacing even mighty Nike, has a broader age appeal than its competitors.

Consumer segmentation still makes sense, but in today’s increasing diversified consumer populations, it is often counterproductive. Gap realized this after 23 months of unbroken losses and adopted a new tag line: “For all generations.” It returned to profitability.

Sorry, my old hippie friend, consumer segmentation is one thing that should be done in moderation.

Traveling in Unfriendly Skies

As my Delta flight winged away from Atlanta, I read a letter from Delta’s CEO Gerald Grinstein in the Delta Sky magazine. Mr. Grinstein held forth on Delta’s 75-year tradition of great service. He lied. What major airline outside of Southwest gives great service these days?

Sparing you the details, the flight I was on was a replacement flight. Delta was unable to get me from Savannah to my originally scheduled flight on time. Atlanta’s flight controllers had reduced inbound flights to Atlanta because of weather. So how could I fault Delta for my
Missed connection? I don’t. But I fault them for other things – like not giving a damn about its customers.

Several weeks ago, when trying to change my wife’s flight from Denver back home because of a medical emergency involving my youngest daughter, United Airlines demanded $100.00 to make the change. Delta would have done the same.

Why do airlines change our itineraries with impunity, but do not accord customers the same courtesy? For instance, why couldn’t Delta have issued customers who missed connections in Atlanta that evening a voucher that could be used to change an itinerary in the future without charge?

After all, like the weather that caused Delta to keep my Savannah flight grounded, things like medical emergencies and other unexpected events sometimes keep its customers grounded.

But Delta nor any other majors care about what happens to their customers. Delta might not be flirting with bankruptcy these days if Mr. Grinstein’s claims of great service, which includes concern about what’s going on in customers’ lives, were valid.

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Reinventing Mass Marketing and Branding

So what do you think about McDonald’s new CEO Larry Light’s announcement that because mass marketing is dead, his company is abandoning mass marketing to take up what he calls “brand journalism?”

Is mass marketing dead, as Light claims?

Is his assertion that a single brand identity is “old-fashioned, out-of-date, out –of- touch,” valid?

Despite Light’s claims, neither mass marketing nor single-identity brand positioning are passé. Rather, mass marketing and brand positioning are being reinvented, as indeed must happen if marketing’s well chronicled falling fortunes are to be turned around.

Light explains brand journalism as a brand chronicle that seeks to tell as many different stories in as many different ways as possible to reach the broadest market.

However, to be fully effective, McDonald’s stories must be told in a uniform voice that is consistent with its archetypal brand personality, the Innocent. In fact, Light says that McDonald's iconic Innocent, Ronald McDonald, will be used more in the future to promote the company's messages.

It’s O.K. to have multiple brand messages, but not multiple brand personalities. Coke learned this several times recently when it ran commercials in the voice of Pepsi’s Rebel brand personality rather than in the voice of Coke’s archetypal brand personality, which is also the Innocent. Outraged consumers unleashed a storm of protests.

How is it that people behind Coke, the world’s best known brand, have trouble understanding the importance of a single, unitary brand personality?

I hope Larry Light comes to realize that seminal truth before McDonald’s stories end up as an incoherent mass of multiple brand personalities that leave consumers confused – as happend with the Oldsmobile brand.

60 is Not the New 30

60 is the New 30. Or so says AARP in that new tag line which supposedly captures differences in vitality between today’s seniors and yesteryear’s seniors.

As a 71-year-old who has known many people born in the 19th century, I don’t see generational differences in senior vitality. Of course, there are socioeconomic differences: poor people have always tended to wind down quicker than people of greater means.

My mother was an avid creative gardener whose work people came from miles around to see and photograph. She remained an energetic gardener until the last year of her life at age 89. She hated being called exceptional for her age, telling me once, “Hell, I was always exceptional.”

AARP’s new tagline reflects an ageist perspective rooted in the narcissistic notion that youth is the ideal state of humanness. Marketers idea often express this idea in urgings to act young, look young, stay young, etc. by buying this or that product.

Each age has its own virtues and drawbacks. To hold youth out as the ideal state of humanness says being older is bad. Though it may surprise a lot of younger people, many older people like the age they are at.

Al Oeter, the first person to take gold in four consecutive Olympiads was in an audience I addressed a few years ago. He had just turned 63. After criticizing making youth the gold standard for the old, I shouted out to Al, "Al, would you like to be 35 again?" In a booming voice that resounded throughout the large auditorium he said, "Hell no. Not for anything. Life was much harder then."

If there’s a new 60, it’s one that celebrates life at 60 as having its own unique benefits.

Men in Pink

A Wall Street Journal story a few months ago talked about the rising use of the color pink in men’s fashions.

Today’s WSJ carries a story in Marketplace about how jeans makers are incorporating design elements into men’s jeans that until now were seen only in women’s apparel.

Carl Jung would probably attribute these and other changes in male fashions and behavior to the fact that most adult males are now in midlife or older, a time when men get more deeply in touch with their feminine side – their anima, as Jung termed it.

In contrast, in midlife women begin to reflect more of their masculine side – their animus.

Thus, as boomers continue swelling the ranks of the aging population, making consumers in the second half of life the largest group of adults, society seems to becoming increasingly androgynous.

This being so, it will pay designers of consumer products, retailers and marketers to learn more about what happens to the human psyche in midlife so they can better achieve resonance with the majority of consumers today. And incidentally, young people are reflecting this shift in “gender culture”, as Marti Barletta’ Marketing to Women terms gender specific behavior.

The reason for that is simple: The majority rules in popular culture as in politics and given that adults 40 and older outnumber younger adults 128 to 85 million, they clearly have the demographic mass to influence thinking and behavior in every age group.

How Customers Think

Jerry Zaltman observes in his breakthrough marketing tome, How Customers Think, that 95% of cognitive activity takes place behind the curtains of consciousness. Brain imaging supports that claim.

Our impressions that our perceptions, thinking and decision making form primarily in the conscious mind are illusionary. This can be a disturbing thought because it challenges our traditional sense of autonomy. But not to worry.

The conscious mind’s role is somewhat like that of a company CEO who makes decisions based on information processed by staff outside his field of awareness. In fact, brain researchers often refer to the conscious mind as the Executive Officer.

Given that over 90% of mental activity is unconscious, it is an inescapable conclusion that traditional consumer research fails to capture much of what marketers want to know about consumers. Leading brain researcher Bernard J. Baars, has this to say about our conscious awareness of our motivations:

“Our inability to accurately report intentions and expectations may simply reflect the fact that they are qualitatively not conscious.”

Baars’s views represent a solid consensus among contemporary brain scientists.

It is time that marketing researchers and practitioners join that consensus. Brain researchers have made it quite clear that to really understand customers’ needs, motivations and behavior, one must look deep into the unconscious brain where lie the roots of needs and motivations that are beyond the direct reach of research subjects’ conscious minds.

A good place to start is by reading Zaltman’s eye-opening book, How Customers Think.

Numbers Are Not Reality

Einstein wisely observed, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Yet, mainstream marketing reflects a bias toward the idea that the realities of consumer behavior are best revealed by numbers. Rules of statistical math all too often hold sway over principles of behavior in marketing planning. It speaks volumes about how little importance is accorded behavioral science in marketing that an MBA in marketing can be earned without a single course in behavior.

Marketing by the numbers worked reasonably well when youth dominated the marketplace because young people tend to move in tandem. Knowing what the group thinks and does gives a pretty good indication of what most individuals in the group think and do.

Things aren’t so simple in the 40+ markets that now contain the majority of adult consumers. A substantial body of empirical research in the field of adult development psychology indicates increased individuation in the second half of life that leads people to stray more away from the herd in their behavior.

Thus, it takes more than traditional quantitative research to figure out the behavior of older consumers. In fact, surveying older people can result in highly misleading results. They often look at a graded question, e.g. “Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree” and want to say “It depends.” But because the survey can’t accommodate conditional responses they are forced into answers that aren’t entirely accurate.

Teen Music Tastes Today

I borrowed my 18-year-old daughter’s car the other day and was struck by the fact that she had locked in a radio station that only plays music from the 1960s and 1970s. Had I made a similar choice when I was her age I would have been listening to music from 1900 to 1920.

I find it fascinating that Stephanie and many of her friends are drawn to music that was played 25 to 45 years ago. Another wrinkle in their music tastes that differs from my tastes at their ages is how music with spiritual themes appeals to them.

I’d be interested in anyone's thoughts on these new dimensions in music for youth.

Does Marketing Need Reform?

If I were asked to give a State of Marketing Address, I might title my talk “Does Marketing Need Reform?”

In fact, on August 9 that question will be examined by a roster of marketing luminaries in Boston at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. Yankelovich Partners CEO J. Walker Smith will kick off the symposium with a discussion of growing consumer resistance to marketing based on his firm’s recent research. Raj Sisodia of Bentley College, under whose aegis the symposium is taking place, will talk about why consumers trust of marketers has fallen to levels accorded used car salespeople.

Northwestern’s peripatetic Philip Kotler promises a rousing wake-up talk at lunch, and the day will conclude with a panel of CMOs responding to the day’s presentations and offering their views on marketing’s future.

Yours truly has also been honored with a place on the agenda.

Because of the importance the symposium’s organizers see this event having to the future of marketing, registration fees have been set low to attract the greatest number of attendees. Registrations by July 9 can be placed for only $225.

Further details can be secured from http://www.bentley.edu/events/markreform/.

In the meantime, you can help us all.

What is your answer to the question, “Does marketing need reform?”

And, “ What would you say are marketing’s three biggest (do five if you’d like) problems?”

Thanks.