What Hath New Media Wrought?

OK, all this new media added to the 21^st century media ecology had to have some visible effects beyond complicating media planning! Well, it’s showing up on TV: Or, more appropriately, about TV.

The median age of people watching prime time TV is 48 years old. Five years ago – just before the invasion of the media landscape by a slew of new technology platforms, one should note, the median age was 44.

Just the Boomers getting older, you say? Well, only a little. The fact is that younger consumers are watching far less TV than before. In fact, they spend about as much time now with their computers as they do with their TV sets.

Someone once suggested that technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it. Given the trends in media consumption patterns perhaps we’ll soon need to rephrase that by adding the phrase “via TV.”

TheTarnish from Celebrity Luster

More and more companies, finding that what used to be their brands were turning into undifferentiated “Category Placeholders,” turned to celebrities to give them some additional demarcation and standing. This is not a new trend, although accompanying the tsunami of celebrity endorsements came a demand for some sense of what marketers were really getting from their celebrity “endorsements” – beyond some nifty advertising and a chance to meet the luminary your marketing budget was large enough to employ.

Outside of the increasingly outrageous costs to “rent” such celebrities, Brand Keys doesn’t much pay attention to the positive effects that accrue to the celebrity. Why should we? The beneficiary of the exercise should be the product or service, not the celebrity. After all, the celebrities get their paychecks and free stuff whether the products sell or not. Brand Keys measures the effects attained by coupling a brand with a celebrity via engagement and loyalty metrics, and we are highly accurate in predicting the outcome of such pairings.

But what would you do if you discovered your celebrity was overshadowing your brand? What do you do when the only benefit of the marketing exercise reverted to the celebrity? What do you do when the only top-of-mind association the public has with your product is the celebrity? And what do you do when the celebrity’s luster tarnishes any chance of differentiation burnish your brand’s been hoping for?

Well, if you were smart, you’d do what General Motors is doing with their celebrity, Tiger Woods. That’s”reducing Woods’ role as a pitchman” for Buick, according to the press releases. Bad for Woods in the long-term (he has a contract through 2010), but good for Buick right now, because in a celebrity spokesperson survey we conducted a number of years ago, Buick was one of the brands we studied and if you eliminated the generic comments related to “automobiles” and “GM,” ALL the other comments consumers came up with regarding the Buick brand – you guessed it – had to do with “Tiger Woods,” which may have been extraordinarily flattering for Mr. Woods, but, as you might imagine, did little for the Buick brand and, more importantly, Buick/GM sales.

And before you rush to try and tie Buick to all the really great adjectives and attributes that go along with Mr. Woods and his vaunted golf skills, note well the comment made by GM VP for North American Vehicle Sales and Marketing, Mark LaNeve: “We don’t want a celebrity at the core of any brand. We want the message on Buick to be about Buick.” Like it was, one can only suppose, more than 50 years ago when people at least knew Buick for its Dynaflow drive and, when asked, “Wouldn’t you rather drive a Buick?” you received a resounding “yes” from your target audience.

Which is as it should be. The product benefits from its marketing efforts. The brand stands for something (other than having a celebrity stand next to it in the advertising).

But here’s another question marketers should be asking before they sign a celebrity to hawk their brands: “Can’t we measure the effects of this BEFORE we pay out all that money?”

And that answer is an equally resounding, “yes!” Brand engagement metrics do just that. And if you use them you won’t find yourself writing enormous checks and struggling to find a role for that celebrity you’ve signed through 2012.

The British Bum Society

Mark Twain famously noted, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” That, of course, was then, and brands, particularly fashion brands, and especially denim blue jeans, can have tremendous influence. From an ad perspective, it’s fair to say that the skimpier and tighter (the jeans and the ad) the better the consumer reaction.

We can’t comment upon how over or under-exposed the advertising was for all the brands, but according to this year’s Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, the top-10 most engaging jeans on the US market were:

1. Levi’s
2. Joe’s Jeans
3. True Religion
4. Wrangler
5. Tommy Hilfiger
6. Diesel
7. Guess
8. Rock & Republic
9. 7 For All Mankind
   
10. GAP

Fashion trends, fashion models, and body self-image influences have always played a part in the marketing of blue jeans, but from across The Pond, here’s a new twist on an old tactic.

UK’s Lee Cooper Denim has created a series of videos that introduce the “Bottom Inspectors,” a version of the old man-on-the-street interview. A veddy British Inspector from the “British Bum Society” measures women's bottoms and has them try on the company's Denim Xfit Lycra slimming and contouring jeans inside a "bum cam" enabled booth. Go to http://www.leecooperuk.com/email/bottom_inspector4.htm to see one.

Another British writer, one Bill Shakespeare, once observed, “The soul of man is in his clothes.” Apparently, when it comes to Lee Cooper Denim jeans, out of them too!

THE COST OF LIVING

Customer loyalty is always important, but never more so than when the cost-of-living goes up. That’s the time customers take a long, hard look at the brands they’re buying and ask themselves “is this product worth what I’m paying? Is it meeting or even exceeding my expectations?” And that’s when you want them to be highly engaged with your brand, because if they are, they’ll be six times less likely to defect on the basis of competitive pricing.

So as a public service, we list the top-20 most expensive cities in the world identified by Mercer Human Resources, and the places marketers need to be even more concerned about loyalty:

1 MOSCOW

2 SEOUL

3 TOKYO

4 HONG KONG

5 LONDON

6 OSAKA

7 GENEVA

8 COPENHAGEN

9 ZURICH

10 OSLO

11 NEW YORK CITY

12 ST.PETERSBURG

13 MILAN

14 BEIJING

15 ISTANBUL

16 PARIS

17 SINGAPORE

18 DUBLIN

19 SYDNEY

20 SHANGHAI

For those of you outside the New York SMSA, Los Angeles ranked 29^th, Chicago 38^th, and Miami 39^th Feeling the pinch? The least expensive (#50) was Prague.

Of course another survey has shown that in spite of the cost of living, it still remains extraordinarily popular!

THE BEER THAT MADE MOZAMBIQUE FAMOUS

It used to be that products could use their country of origin as a significant brand differentiator. Swiss watches, Belgium chocolate, German beer, Japanese electronics, French perfume, things like that all made a difference.

But a recent study found that when it comes to consumers 18 to 24, a brand's country of origin is unimportant suggesting that in the world of the Internet, geographic boundaries are less relevant. In light of those findings, Advertising Age raised the question as to whether the days of jingoism and flag-waving are numbered and whether marketing tactics like the "Heartbeat of America" are flat-lining.

And the answer is. . . it depends.

OK, not the definitive answer marketers would like to readily have at hand, but it does. Depend, I mean. What it depends on is the category you are talking about. Engagement metrics provide the percent-contribution “country of origin” makes to loyalty and sales and profitability. For watches, for example, it’s very important. For beer, not so much so. And that’s why “it depends.” But it is possible to know before committing your brand to such nationalistic marketing policies.

So it depends, but to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, “patriotism is the last refuge of a brand that has very little else to differentiate it.”

BUILDING: THE BRAND

At first it was called the Museum of Broadcasting and that seemed to sum things up. But as cable and satellite transmission entered the broadcasting space the name was changed to the Museum of Television and Radio because you want to make sure your positioning encompasses the broadest swathe of the category you purport to represent.

But category values – just like customer values – modify and migrate. So when the Internet and cell phones and web radio and blogs become integral members of the of 21^st century communications firmament, what’s a building to do?

Re-brand. Or in this case, rename the building, which is exactly what they’re doing. This time the building will be named the “Paley Center for Media,” after William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. The change, according to the board, allows the museum – excuse me, center – to recast itself as not so much an archive as a forum to discuss the role of media and show creation.

Though those outside the industry don’t actually know who Bill Paley was, Pat Mitchell, the museum’s president noted, “They don’t know who Getty is either, or Whitney or Guggenheim. Just having a name attached to it gives it a personality.” Applying, one assumes, the well-crafted approach based on the foundation of brand building of “what's in a name? That which we call a ‘center’ by any other name will still have archives and rotating media displays.”

Illegally Blond

As more and more “brands” lose meaning and find themselves turning into “Category Placeholders,” more and more turn to celebrities to provide that missing daub of differentiation. So what happens when the celebrities the brands rely upon go bad?

As the old ad adage went, since “blonds have more fun,” what of the most recent celebrity trio to go bad, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Nicole Richie, all involved in some combination of alcohol and/or drug DUI/probation violation?

Loyalty and engagement research have identified four patterns of customer response when good brands do bad things:

1. The more heavily the celebrity is associated with the brand, the more devastating the effects.
2. Brands who use celebrities’ names only to, for example, label or franchise a product will see less damage.
3. The public is kinder to male celebrities than they are to women.
4. Brands that have no celebrity association will – in bad times – see about half the negative effects compared to a celebrity-associated brand.

And how do our celebrities feel about all this? Well, Paris Hilton said, “I feel that I was treated unfairly. . . I don’t deserve this.”

Strangely, brands that didn’t vet their celebrities, feel the same way!

Get The Brand Wagon In A Circle!

For 5 years we have tracked the Martha Stewart brand. At one time the brand was one of the strongest in the United States, indexing at 121 in 2002. (Also the lowest, indexing at 64 when she was found guilty on all 5 charges back in 2004).

Since then the brand has hovered around a 102.

We update the measures whenever some significant mention of the brand appears in the press, and so we did just that when the members of the Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation protested Martha’s attempt to trademark the name “Katonah” for a line of home furnishings and paint. Ms. Stewart, who has a 150+ acre estate in Katonah, NY, says that she just “seeks to honor the town and the hamlet using the word Katonah.”

But it turns out that “Katonah” is the name of the tribe’s great 17^th century ancestral chiefs, and leaders of other Indian tribes have joined in the protest.

Autumn Scott, co-chair of the New Jersey State Commission on Indian Affairs notes that she trusted that Martha “intended no malice, but for her to say she is doing so to honor him and our tribe is absurd, especially when it is being done solely for profit.”

Well, clearly those two parties have their own agendas, but what of the consumer? A recent updated assessment of Martha’s brand (among customers who knew of the battle sided with the Indians) found that the current brand equity rating is down to 97.

Since loyalty and engagement and profitability correlate very highly with these assessments, this is clearly NOT a “good thing.”