As we saw in the Easter Bunny example, new ideas can travel with old stories.
Congress succeeded brilliantly with the Easter Bunny technique just this week. By calling Mark McGwire and other baseball players to testify about steroid use (and doing it during spring training), they instantly escalated the profile of the issue of drug abuse by teen athletes.
Now, whenever someone talks about McGwire, they will automatically be talking about steroid use. The two stories get intertwined and are more likely to get noticed.
Yes, smart Congressmen are marketers too (you already knew they were liars).
March 8, 2005
It wasn’t until 1,600 years after Jesus that the Bunny became associated with Easter. If you think about it, it’s pretty weird (bunnies don’t lay eggs), but it’s part of a long standing pattern of new religions stealing symbols and stories from older religions.
Bunnies are pretty prolific creatures, and thousands of years ago pagans picked them as a symbol of new life. Spring being the season of new life, bunnies were a sign of celebration and good luck. The story is a good one, and it spread.
Just like Christmas trees and lights in the window for the winter holidays, the marketers responsible for spreading the word about Christianity appropriated the symbol to help them market the new holiday.
Have I mentioned that Godiva is owned by Campbell’s Soup? Godiva
Ten or fifteen years ago, I took Milton Glaser’s class at the School for Visual Arts in New York. It was a portfolio class, which means you had to have talent to get in.
I didn’t. (have talent). I persisted, and we agreed that I could take the class with all these fancypants designers on probation. My point to him was that I was going to commission and use a lot of design in my career, and I’d be a good part of the mix. The deal was that I’d sit in for three classes and then he could decide if I added value or not.
The first class I was too scared to participate, but I learned a lot.
The second class, I participated and added some good thoughts.
The third class, I disagreed twice with points he made. It may be that I was the first person in a while who had disagreed with him twice.
He threw me out.
It turns out that:
a. I was right about what I disagreed with him on.
b. I should have figured out how to stay in the class.
c. I ended up buying and doing a lot of design. Go figure.
Anyway, Milton’s been thinking a lot of the thoughts I’ve been sharing on this blog. Worth a read, click below:
Link: Publications.
DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
thanks to Billy Sobdzyk for the ping.
I bought gas for my car today and put the credit card in upside down. Took a few minutes in the snow to figure out what was going on.
But wait. Computers are close to free. Why should it be my job to put the card in right side up? Why can’t the machine read the card in every direction?
Think of how often computers, the web, machines, voice mail systems and other devices require us to change our behavior to make it more convenient for the chip or the chip designer.
I think there’s a huge opportunity in using massively redundant computer systems to allow humans to be stupid again.
Exhibit A: Why isn’t backing up considered an automatic function too important to be left to the user?
MagTek – The Technology Behind The Transaction.
Over the last decade or two, many neighborhoods have seen the price of homes increase by 100 to 1000%. Because real estate agents charge a commission based on selling price, this means that many agents make ten times as much as they used to for selling a house.
Obviously, they’re not doing ten times as much work.
Sooner or later, in any business that works on percentages, things change and the commissions come under pressure. You can be defensive about this or you can see it as an opportunity.
One broker in Massachusetts now works by the hour (Beating the Realtor commission system). If I were a broker, I’d take the increased cash flow and spend it as fast as I could. I’d fundamentally change what I offer and include a wide range of free services–from a free paint job to help sell the house to a new big screen TV for the buyer or the seller. I’d hire assistants and build a permission-based computer system. I’d realize that no industry is static, especially one where the rates go up by a factor of ten in just a short time.
Obviously, this is about more than just real estate. If you work by the hour, what would happened if you charged a commission instead? (PR folks? Lawyers?) What happens to the sales process when you flip from success-based pricing to time-based? Or the other way around?
If this painting were for sale, you’d have to pay millions to acquire it.
And yet, when it first painted, you could have paid just a few thousand dollars to own it.
What happened? Did the painting change? Is it a better painting today than it was?
What about the Shelby Cobra knock offs you can buy on eBay for $50,000? These are totally awesome cars, insanely fast and in many ways better built than the real Cobras, which are worth five or ten times as much.
Obviously, we’re tweaking on the words “real” and “value” here. If all you’re buying is a car, or excitement or the jealousy of your neighbors, the knock off is just fine. But that’s not all that people buy. Mostly, they buy a story.
March 7, 2005
On the Henry Hudson Bridge to New York are very stern signs warning, “No Photography”. This is undoubtedly for our own security, as bad guys might take photos to case the bridge. Unfortunately for the security folks, the bridge is surrounded by literally hundreds of apartments, each one of which has a window from which highly detailed telephoto pictures could easily be taken.
The sign to the left is almost 5 feet tall and greets visitors in the lobby of a very expensive office building on the East Side of Manhattan. Not sure where they got the number 28, or why they need to be precise, except that they are clearly trying to tell me a story. The cheesy ALL CAPS lettering ads to the urgency. This is the same story that buildings in New York use when the guy at the front desk asks to see your driver’s license before allowing you to be admitted. How does having a driver’s license change anything? It doesn’t, of course. The act of stopping to show it does.
The implications of lying about security and telling stories to make us feel better is expensive indeed. We’re spending billions in cash (and untold billions in lost time and productivity) pretending to do something, when all we’re really doing is changing the way people feel. At the same time, we ignore the low-profile but high-value acts of, say, inspecting air cargo.
Obviously, we’re not going to eliminate the need to tell stories. What we ought to do, though, is figure out more effective (low-cost and high-impact) ways to tell better stories. El Al (Israel’s airline) for example, dispenses with obvious uses of technology and instead grills passengers at random. It’s not clear to me that the conversations are the answer–it’s the way the conversations make the other passengers feel that matters.
Many marketers and millions of consumers are aware that there ain’t no Haagen, there ain’t no Dazs and the popular brand of ice cream is nothing but a lie.
Does it matter?
Two made up words, a product that has nothing whatever to do with Scandinavia and gleaming stainless steel factories pumping the stuff out by the ton–it doesn’t change the fact that we’re more likely to pay extra for a Haagen Dazs than we would for the identical product from Hood or Sealtest.
And knowing doesn’t really seem to matter. Knowing that there’s no truthful difference appears to be irrelevant. I think that’s because there’s a non-rational, even emotional part of our brain that yearns for the story.
Damian Jennings points us to Huhcorp, a brilliant site that demonstrates what happens when there’s all lies, and no time for an actual product.
My favorite part are the stock photos. Perfect. Check out the site: We do stuff.
Yes, we all “know” that smoking causes death, that it contributes to more illness-related deaths than anything else we choose to do, that it also degrades the quality of life of those that are addicted.
Marketers know (and always knew) that the combination of its addictive properties and the young age at which people choose to smoke make it a home run in the ROI department.
And yet, deep down, all of us “know” that it’s cool.
How did it get cool? Why do intelligent adults imagine that artfully lighting a cigarette is more James Bond than bowery bum? That puffing is more Marlene Dietrich than emphysema victim?
Because cigarette marketers were genius storytellers. Of course they lied to us. They told us a story we wanted to believe, a story about the wild west and freedom and sexuality and youth and hipness.
This was an astonishingly expensive story to tell, I grant you that. But once told, the meme entered our vocabulary and it’s going to be around for generations.
As you can see, this lying thing is a double-edged sword. More on that soon.
