Folks Can Digg Shoes For Needy Kids

from the looooots-of-shoes dept

With an offer that reminds me of the OLPC "give 1, get 1" promotion (but hopefully without the delivery complaints), Digg is selling a Digg-branded shoe, made by TOMS Shoes. For those who haven't seen its commercials, TOMS Shoes has the catchy promise (called One for One) that for every pair of shoes it sells, it gives away a pair of new shoes to needy kids in developing countries.

This bit of marketing is brilliant because it ties together a nice "reason to buy" story with a physical good (the shoes), and the whole story promotes both Digg and TOMS Shoes. Eventually, I assume Digg and TOMS could also easily create a Threadless-like store for more custom shoes (instead of T-shirt designs). The current shoe design was created by a Digg employee, but it seems possible that Digg users could submit shoe designs of their own. And apparently, TOMS shoes sells T-shirts, too, so Digg users may get to Digg/Bury some T-Shirt designs someday as well.

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Musicians Are Never Just About The Music

from the welcome-to-the-modern-world dept

Recently, I wrote about how musicians need both good music and marketing to be successful. That was in response to Bob Lefsetz' recent complaints that too many musicians with neat business models these days seem too focused on the marketing side, rather than promoting the music. But I think it's unfair to play down the importance of the marketing side. While not specifically jumping into that discussion, Hypebot's Bruce Houghton is making a very similar point by debunking the myth that there was some era when musicians could just focus on being musicians:

I'm sorry if this comes as a surprise, but it has never been enough to just make great music. Every generation of musicians has had to face their own challenges which forced them to go beyond creation and recording.

Frank Sinatra made movies to reach a bigger fan base. Elvis's hips and haircut were as much a part of his success as his recordings were. David Bowie learned that image and imagery could propel him to greater heights. After Saturday Night Fever, dance steps helped propel many live shows and for a time MTV made being visual an important component of success.

Whether it's getting in a van and giving an endless string of memorable performances or sitting on the phone for hours talking to journalists, there have always been skills beyond just making music that, if not required, certainly made success more likely

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50 Cent: Piracy Is A Part Of The Marketing

from the they-end-up-at-the-concert dept

Famed rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) was apparently on CNBC recently talking about his "business acumen." I have to admit that having three different people all trying to interview him at once is rather annoying -- as they almost never let him complete a thought. However, when they ask him about piracy, and whether or not it makes him angry (around 2 minutes), he responds that: he sees it as a part of the marketing of a musician, because "the people who didn't purchase the material, they end up at the concert." He says that people can fall in love with the music either way, and then they'll go to concerts. He notes that you can't stop piracy either way, so why try to fight it? He also talks about other business opportunities for musicians.

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Music And Marketing -- You Need Them Both

from the it's-not-just-one dept

A couple people have sent over Bob Lefsetz' recent post, where he bashes some of the "extreme marketing" efforts from musicians lately. In fact, he picks on quite a few of the examples that we've set out as good examples, including Josh Freese, Jill Sobule and Moldover -- complaining that these are all gimmicks that outshine the music. He asks how many people who have heard about these gimmicks actually heard the music from these artists.

I think he's both right and wrong on this. First, you have to say "compared to what." If Freese, Sobule and Moldover had just come out with an album in the traditional way, how many of the same group of people would likely have heard the album? I'd say a lot fewer. I doubt I would have heard any of them, and now I'm quite familiar with the music of all three.

But... his larger point is definitely dead on. At the core of all of this, it is the music that is key. But putting out good music and being a good marketer are not mutually exclusive. If you do something cool -- something fun or valuable or neat beyond just the music -- it's not going to matter as much if the music itself isn't good. This is why, I have to admit, the one area where I think all three of these artists could have done a better job is actually making the music itself free. All three offered really compelling reasons to buy, but they still hid away the actual music. Why not free up the MP3s, continue the cool "reasons to buy" and get the best of both worlds. Then you get everything: you get people listening to the music and feeling a connection there. You get people paying attention for the "marketing" part, and you still make money thanks to the "reasons to buy."

But that doesn't mean that doing a smart marketing promotion is a bad thing. It just needs to tie in well with the music. The existing "true fans" will already want to hear the music, but if part of the goal is to attract new fans, you have to go beyond just the marketing to give them more access to the core music -- and focus on selling them on real reasons to buy something above and beyond the content.

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Kiddie Monitoring Software Spying On IM Chats, Selling Info To Marketers

from the yeah,-that'll-go-over-well dept

There are a bunch of different "child filtering/monitoring" software on the market these days, and many parents use it to help them keep track of what their kids do online. I have no problem with this -- so long as such filters aren't mandated by the government. But it appears that just selling the tools isn't enough for some companies. JJ sends in the news that one of the top providers in the space doesn't just monitor what kids do for parents, but collects all the data -- including the text of chat room discussions -- and resells it to marketers. You have to imagine that this isn't exactly what the FTC (or parents) expects of such tools.

The company defends the practice, claiming that the data is anonymized and no identifiable data is included -- but we've heard that before. Every single time someone insists their data is anonymized, news breaks showing that it is not. I don't think there's anything wrong, necessarily, with doing targeted marketing programs, but using unsuspecting parents and getting them to install filters and monitoring software, without realizing the data will be handed over to marketing firms, seems pretty sleazy.

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Sprint Offers Palm Pre For $100 For A Month, Maybe Two... Then, Oops, Not At All

from the great-moments-in-marketing dept

I recently explained why I thought Sprint made a rather large strategic marketing error in pricing the Palm Pre at the equivalent price of an iPhone: $199 (after annoying mail-in rebate that turns many buyers off). In fact, I argued why it would make a lot more sense to further subsidize the phone all the way to free, and make up the money on the backend with more subscriptions. Given how heavily invested Sprint was in the Pre, and how pathetic the sales have been to date, it really makes very little sense to keep the price so high. So, at the very least, I thought it was a good first step this morning when it was "announced" that Sprint was offering the Pre at $99. Of course, there were some silly things about this promotion as well. First, it only applied to new customers, transferring numbers over from other carriers. What better way to mock your loyal customers than to offer others a better deal? Second, they didn't just discount the phone, but gave you a "credit" that was split over the first three bills (better than a mail-in rebate, but still annoying). However, what was even stranger was that Sprint didn't even seem to understand the promotion itself. John Paczkowski noted that in some places on Sprint's website it said the promotion ran until October 10th. In others it said October 31st.

Apparently, the confusion at Sprint headquarters went well beyond that, because as the company attempted to sort out the confusion, it announced that it was doing away with the special promotion entirely. And yet, even after announcing it, the offer page remained on Sprint's site. It's not at all clear what happened here, other than Sprint seems somewhat clueless in how to do basic promotions, pricing and marketing. Obviously, the company intended to offer the phone for $99 -- it's on the company's own site. And yet, now it's suddenly claiming that it was a mistake? I can already see the business school case study on how not to launch an innovative smart phone.

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It's Not The 'Good Enough' Revolution; It's Recognizing What The Consumer Really Wants

from the and-that's-good-enough dept

It's hardly a new idea, but BullJustin points us to an article in Wired about what the author, Robert Capps, refers to as The Good Enough Revolution, in which he talks about various offerings that have succeeded in the marketplace, despite not having the "quality" of the leading products. So, he talks about the Flip Digital video cameras, compared to higher end camcorders, mp3s vs. CDs, and things like Zoho Writer vs. Microsoft Word. His explanation is that these "lower quality" products are "good enough," and tend to offer certain features, such as easier accessibility, lower price and better ease of use.

I'd argue that the concept of "good enough" misses the point -- and the real issue is that the actual quality is in those other characteristics that he discusses. The real problem is that some start to focus on the "quality" of some aspect of the product, rather than the quality of meeting what the consumer wants. It's the same thing we've discussed over and over again, with a company (or industry) not really understanding its market. The first automobiles were a lot crappier than the fancy horse carriages you could buy -- but they did the important thing better: getting you somewhere faster and cheaper.

The issue is that the focus on "quality" is on the wrong attribute. It's also why many people falsely claim that the VHS beat Betamax, despite "lower quality." Yes, it may have had lower quality of the recorded video, but that wasn't the attribute people cared about. They wanted to be able to record longer videos, which the Betamax was not set up to do, but VHS was. In almost every one of these stories, you find that it really was an issue of quality -- but the real question was what attribute the market cared about when it came to quality.

With the MP3 and the Flip Camera and Zoho Writer (and many others), it appears convenience is a driving attribute. So while all may seem to have less in terms of the type of "quality" that some like to focus on, they ignore what the market actually wants, which appears to be convenience.

This, too, is one of the reasons why it doesn't make sense to get so focused on the product when you don't know what the market actually wants. The people who create the initial products almost always assume that the most important attributes are the product itself, rather than the convenience it provides users. There will always be snobs who want to focus on the "highest quality" possible, but they're part of a small market, rather than a mass market. And if that's "good enough" for them, that's fine -- but it misses the real marketing opportunity.

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Why Sprint Should Be Giving Away The Palm Pre For Free

from the just-get-that-sucker-out-there dept

There was plenty of hype around the launch of the Palm Pre, which by all accounts is a pretty damn good phone (I've played around with it, and like it). However, Palm and Sprint made two huge mistakes in marketing it. First, they didn't have a really well-developed developer community building apps for it, so the app store is pretty weak. Apple did this with the iPhone when it launched (and we dinged them at the time as well), but Apple got away with it for two reasons: Apple is leading the field in such smartphones, and it's Apple, who seems able to bring developers to the table with cultish enthusiasm and loyalty.

Palm doesn't quite have that.

If the problem was that the SDK wasn't ready, Sprint and Palm should have waited. Launching before the phone was really ready was a mistake, and the company may be paying for it with rather weak sales after an initial burst. However, one analyst has a suggestion that I think makes a lot of sense, saying that Sprint should drop the price of the Palm Pre to $0.99. Basically, let Sprint subsidize more of the phone -- which it would easily make back in service fees (since the phone requires a two year contract with its most expensive data plan). Pricing the phone at $199 makes it a direct comparison to the iPhone, and that's the last thing that Palm or Sprint should want. But dropping the price to $1 (or, hell, give the damn phone away for free with a two year plan), would get it a lot of attention, and give people a real reason to switch away from other carriers or other phones, and give the Pre a shot. Trying to compete with the iPhone by just saying "but we're better" doesn't work. Rather than spending tons of money on creepy TV commercials that make no sense, why not use that ad budget to subsidize the phone in a way that really builds up a lot of attention and serious buyers? If Sprint did that, I'd go sign up for a Palm Pre that very day.

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Elsevier Caught Again: Published Ghost Written, Industry Supporting Articles As Scientific Resesarch

from the credibility? dept

Earlier this year, it was revealed that publishing giant Elsevier had allowed pharma king Merck to create a fake peer reviewed journal that hyped up certain Merck products, such that doctors would think that there was some serious science behind them. It later came out that Elsevier actually had a whole division which specialized in publishing such fake journals, made to appear real, and given the Elsevier stamp of approval (which hopefully is now becoming worthless). But, it appears things keep getting worse. Coral Hess notes yet another scandal, once again involving Elsevier's (now) fake stamp of approval. This time, it involved people hired by certain pharma companies ghostwriting scientific "review" articles that were supposed to give an overview of all the research on certain treatments, but... "emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks" of those treatments. And people wonder why we're so skeptical about allowing pharma companies to dictate both our healthcare plans and our patent laws...

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You Can't Predict What Will Drive Music Business Models... So Be Open To Everything

from the don't-count-it-out... dept

Topspin CEO Ian Rogers has a great post detailing how (contrary to his own beliefs) Twitter appears to be quickly becoming a very powerful channel for promoting music and playing into music business models. He gives two examples of how Twitter provided a huge push in driving sales of products for the bands Jimmy Eat World and Arcade Fire. However, his concluding paragraph is the key:

What to conclude from all this? That Twitter is the marketing machinery of the future? Naw. This isn't about "the next big thing". It's about how little we know about how marketing will work and how transactions (not just purchases, but any kind of value exchange) will be earned (and I do mean earned) in the future. Success is highly variable. Execution matters (as James said). Unexpected events can make an impact. People are powerful marketers.

This is actually really important. It's why you want to enable others to help promote for you however they're most comfortable promoting your works. Yet, over the past decade, what we've seen is how the music industry has tried, at almost every turn, to limit how people promote music to others, and to funnel fans into a very limited set of options for how to interact with the music. If you want to capture the biggest possible bang for the buck, you have to step back and let the community figure out the best way to help promote your works, rather than assuming you can dictate it.

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Why Was It Bad For The Chicago Tribune To Find Out What Readers Wanted?

from the i'm-confused dept

There was a recent dustup in Chicago as news came out that the Chicago Tribune had been running reader surveys on certain news stories before they were published. This has upset a bunch of folks at the Tribune who claim that it somehow "breaks the bond between reporters and editors in a fundamental way." The Tribune has apologized and claimed the whole program was a mistake. But, for the life of me, I'm having trouble figuring out what's the problem. Actually finding out what your community wants? Getting feedback? Being more interactive and engaged with the community? Listening to them? Being open and recognizing a story is a living document? These are all things that any newspaper should be doing these days.

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It's Time For Empathy Marketing

from the marketing-is-not-a-one-way-street dept

While most people think that marketing is about "convincing someone to buy stuff," that was not its original purpose. Instead, that's what it's become for many. But the real purpose for marketing was supposed to be to listen to what the market was saying, and help create products that met their needs. The good news is that, with the economy struggling, some are starting to go back to that definition. David Churbuck, who works in marketing at Lenovo, is predicting that marketing is starting to go through a massive change towards what he calls "empathy marketing." It gets beyond the old "four Ps" of marketing that we were all taught in marketing class, and gets to actually taking the time to actually talk with (not to) your customer -- and some of the time that means having the brand shut up and let everyone else do the talking.

This is one of the benefits that we've seen in preaching the message that content is advertising and advertising is content. Traditional advertising (and, increasingly, marketing as well) has been about a one-way street: pushing a message and trying to get it ingrained in people's heads. It's had little to do with getting people to interact, embrace and share. But when you actually take the time to recognize that marketing and advertising should be a two way street, where you're holding a real conversation and everyone is getting value out of it, you start to get beyond "pushing a message" and really get to a place where good things happen. It's what we've been helping plenty of companies do via the Insight Community. Companies like Dell and American Express have tapped into the community to create discussions and generate insights in ways that are useful to everyone.

Users find more of what they're actually looking for, build up better trust in certain companies, and actually are a part of the ongoing process and discussion. Companies get to better interact with customers or potential customers, and get real advice and feedback in return. Whether it's called conversational marketing or empathy marketing, it's a good thing: it's a return to real marketing, where it wasn't about convincing people to buy, but really interacting with the market to figure out how to provide what it needs, rather than telling the market what the marketers want to sell.

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The Fight To Patent A 'Paradigm' For Marketing

from the fantastic dept

Slashdot points us to a story about Scott Harris' ongoing attempt to get a patent on a way to market software. Harris is effectively trying to claim a patent on a "paradigm" of marketing software for other companies. For a variety of reasons this should be unpatentable, and so far (thankfully), the USPTO and the courts have agreed -- but Harris keeps trying to appeal, claiming that a company is no different than a machine -- and if a machine can be patented, so can the "paradigm" of the company.

Whenever we discuss patents around here, and say anything about patenting an "idea" or a "concept" the patent system supporters in the crowd are quick to yell and scream about how you can only patent "inventions" or the "reduction to practice" rather than the idea or the concept. But as anyone who's been watching the patent system over the past couple of decades knows, the definitions are being pushed, tweaked and stretched beyond recognition -- and Harris's attempts here are representative of that fact. It's great that they haven't succeed yet -- but plenty of other such twists on patent law have been happening for years.

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AT&T Moves Away From 'Up To' Marketing

from the finally! dept

For years, one of our pet peeves was the use of "up to" in telco marketing -- as in, "you get speeds up to 10 Mbps!" The "up to" lets providers basically make up whatever they want, as any speed below that number is still technically covered. However, in the last few years, some have started pushing back -- even questioning whether the use of "up to" marketing was false advertising. That's why it's nice to see that AT&T, for one, appears to be moving away from the practice. Broadband Reports notes that AT&T's new terms of service seems to show the range of speeds, rather than using "up to." That seems a lot more accurate and reasonable.

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Yes, Marketing Matters To Innovation Too

from the and-it's-a-part-of-innovation dept

There seems to be something of a knee-jerk dislike for "marketing," as if it's something to be shunned and has little to do with anything useful in the marketplace. While it's true that there's plenty of bad marketing out there, good marketing actually serves a really important function -- helping companies determine what the market actually demands, and then delivering products to fill that need (note that, contrary to popular opinion, marketing shouldn't be about convincing people to buy what they don't need). This comes up quite often when we discuss things like patents -- where we point out where one company was successful in bringing a product to market, whereas another failed (and then resorts to patent lawsuits). Some people brush off such successes as "just marketing," as if it's meaningless.

That's simply incorrect.

Marketing is an important part of the innovation process, in understanding what a market wants and making sure it gets it. If one company has better "marketing," that means it's doing a better job getting products out that the market wants. We should be celebrating that, rather than brushing it off as "mere marketing." This is highlighted by a recent blog post by Matt Asay, where he points to the status of two hyped up open source projects that both have failed (by a wide margin) to live up to the hype: Linspire and Chandler. Linspire was the Linux version that was supposed to take on Windows (it was originally called Lindows, but a lawsuit took care of that). However, it's now closed down. Chandler, which has been seven years in the making, was supposed to take on Microsoft Exchange, but after Mitch Kapor finally dropped the project, seems to have emerged as a greatly scaled back notepad/task mgmt system. It took them seven years to build that?

Asay points out the basic fact that "mere marketing" is more important than you might think, and brushing it off is often what leads to these kinds of failures:

Perhaps the lesson in both Linspire and Chandler is just how hard it is to build a strong consumer-facing business. For those who pooh-pooh Microsoft's success as "mere marketing" I have a suggestion: You need to get into this "mere marketing" business. It has a way of driving adoption. It matters.

Engineers like to think they know best, but the market makes the final decision on that -- and it often helps to have good marketing paired with those good engineers to make things work on both ends.

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Turns Out Just Saying A Marketing Campaign Is Viral Doesn't Make It So

from the who-knew? dept

In case you hadn't realized it, a new research report (that I'm sure you can buy for plenty of money) says that it's not so easy to make a viral marketing campaign actually be viral. Who knew? Well, probably everyone but some marketers. Viral campaigns are nice if you can get them to work, but betting an entire strategy on a viral campaign is pretty dangerous, no matter how much the media pretends that there's some secret magical formula to make products viral.

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Marketing Execs And Privacy Execs Disagree Over What Companies Do With Private Info

from the data-leaks dept

We've already established that privacy policies are pretty much useless, no matter how much some organizations want to pretend they matter. First off, no one reads them -- and if you asked most people, they simply assume that if a site has any privacy policy then it automatically means they won't give away any personal details to others -- even if the privacy policy says exactly the opposite. In other words, someone could put up a privacy policy that says that it will reveal all your personal data to organized criminals, and most people would think that the site was safe. It's "privacy theater" designed to make people feel good, but that has nothing to do with real privacy.

And, of course, it's not just the people reading the policies that don't seem to understand them -- it's those in charge of living up to and enforcing the policies. A new study surveyed a bunch of executives, including both marketing execs and those in charge of enforcing the privacy policy, and quickly discovered that marketers have a very different concept of "privacy" than privacy officers. Not surprisingly, they don't see anything wrong with sharing all sorts of data that seems to horrify privacy officers. So, no matter who controls the policy (or where it's posted on a site), the real issue may be who actually has access to the data and what they're able to do with it.

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The New Music Business: Enabling Musicians To Take Advantage Of New Business Models

from the nice-to-see dept

It seems that whenever we write about various bands embracing new business models, one of the criticisms raised is this idea that we're somehow expecting musicians to also become businessmen to embrace these new models. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we've pointed out that this is exactly the space on which record labels should be focused: helping musicians embrace these new business models, helping to handle the business and the technology, while the musicians focus on the music. Unfortunately, most major record labels still haven't figured this out, due to either legacy issues and contracts, an unwillingness to let go of old business models, or simple cluelessness.

Of course, the longer the major labels take to realize that this is where the market is headed, the bigger the opportunities there are for others to come in and fill that "enablement" gap. There are going to be more and more interesting startups entering the space. One that's starting to get some buzz is TopSpin, which just revealed its business late last week. TopSpin got some press a few months back by getting Yahoo Music boss Ian Rogers to join as CEO. We've written about some of Rogers' cogent writings on the music business before.

TopSpin isn't a record label, but it wants to basically enable all sorts of internet-based business models to work for musicians so that they can focus on making music. From the sound of it, that involves plenty of backend infrastructure, as well as front-end components, so that musicians can easily pick and choose custom, scaleable business models for their website with little effort. The company already has a nice headstart (and even some high profile customers). What may be most interesting, however, is to see how the business model opportunities evolve over time, as TopSpin may grow to have the best understanding of what business models really work, depending on what the circumstances are for the band. That could be incredibly powerful data by itself.

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Word Of Mouth Marketing Isn't Effective If Your Product Sucks

from the just-saying... dept

Way too many people seem to think that "word of mouth marketing" is about getting others to spread your marketing message. That is, they think it's about putting words into the mouths of others. But that's not true at all. Real word of mouth marketing is about building a great product, and then letting your customers pass on the news however they see fit. If there's anything to do on the "marketing" side, it's merely to enable the tools for your biggest fans to spread the word, and then get the hell out of the way. However, it appears many marketers still don't understand this concept.

Reader Aaron deOliveira writes in to point out a story about Hollywood studios apparently giving up on word of mouth marketing campaigns targeted at "faith-based" audiences promoting certain messages that the studios hoped would resonate with folks who are religious. In the article, they toss up all sorts of reasons why such campaigns haven't done all that well, but deOliveira points to a blog post by Ben McConnell where he makes a different assertion: perhaps all those word of mouth campaigns failed because the movies just weren't that good. It's just that the studios are so sure of their product that they never even noticed it. So, once again, it goes back to this: word of mouth marketing is never going to make a lick of difference if your product sucks. Rather than focusing on such things, concentrate on making a good product first -- and then worry about the marketing campaign. And if the campaign fails -- recognize that maybe it's got something to do with the product.

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How A Big Record Label Could Make Itself Useful: Act As The Filter

from the bring-the-audience dept

For a while now, we've been pointing out why there is still a space in the new music landscape for record labels -- but it's just that they need to adapt in significant ways. Last week, we wrote about some of what Warner Brothers Records was working on (even as its parent company seems to be working overtime to kill any goodwill). Now, Ian Rogers, the former GM of Yahoo Music who has written provocative posts about the industry before, has written an open letter to EMI's boss, Guy Hands, with some suggestions on how EMI can save itself as a record label.

Rogers starts out by making the key point: in the past musicians went to record labels to get money, distribution and marketing. However, these days, money is less important thanks to cheaper and cheaper recording tools, distribution help is less important thanks to the internet and even marketing help is less important (again thanks to the internet). Rogers suggests that the first two are basically meaningless to artists now, so all that really matters is if a label can help them market themselves better than they could on their own. And, on that front, he has a simple suggestion: affinity labels. Put together various mini-labels under which similar types of bands are associated. And, include on those labels a few of the "big name" EMI artists. Thus, for all the fans who are fans of some huge artist, by creating these affinity labels, it will help drive the fans of the big name artist to those other bands as well, knowing that they all have a similar sound or musical philosophy.

What Rogers is really pointing out is that thanks to the vast explosion of music available these days, bands don't need help getting "out there" any more -- they need help standing out from the clutter. Fans, on the other side, need a better filter to figure out what's worth listening to, and that's something that an affinity label could stand for. It plays the role of the filter, and allows the major label (like EMI) to leverage its connections with big name bands, to drive additional interest to lesser known bands by associating the names on the same affinity label. It's an idea that makes plenty of sense (in fact, there are a few small independent labels that already live via this concept -- within certain niches, you can find people who will buy nearly every album released on a specific label).

So would EMI go for it? Lucky for Ian (and for EMI), Guy Hands isn't a long-term music industry guy stuck to the old ways. He's a private equity guy who seems to recognize that the industry needs to change -- which has meant pushing back against the RIAA and the IFPI and even hiring a Google guy to run the digital strategy at EMI (though, hopefully, he won't be pigeonholed as "the digital guy").

While I agree with almost all of Ian's post -- there is one thing that I disagree with. I think that a label can certainly help beyond just the marketing -- and that's in managing some of the new business models that are coming out these days. We keep hearing people complain that musicians don't want to manage these new business models, and a smart music label could (and should) be helping on that front as well.

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