By Linda Forrest
This past week, there’s been a lot of brouhaha in the media about Baby Einstein and the refund that Disney, the parent company of Baby Einstein, is offering. The New York Times called the refund offer “a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect,” a damning admission and a triumphant affirmation for those who believe, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, that television under the age of two is, in fact, damaging to children, impeding their language development and at the very least, not improving their cognitive ability, an audacious claim that was made in the early days of baby videos.
In my personal opinion, it’s very interesting to see a company as powerful as Disney subject itself to the financial loss and damage to its image that is inevitable by offering this refund. With more than one-third of American households having at least one Baby Einstein DVD and the company offering $15.99 for up to four DVDs per household, the potential cost is significant. (Disney, however, has a gazillion dollars and is unlikely to feel any real pain from this exercise.) The reasons for it doing so are up for debate, but the company’s detractors say it stems from a pending Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company for making false claims about the “educational value” of such videos, while Disney says a money-back guarantee is standard policy and available to any dissatisfied customer. Who is to say what the real reason is.
There’s no group of people more ardent about their beliefs and their methods than dedicated parents and so this recent battle has been heated. Largely fought between the Walt Disney Company and the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood, a group that self-identifies as a “coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents, and individuals who care about children,” the fight has more recently become a mud-slinging brawl between the CCFC’s leader and the general manager of the Baby Einstein brand.
It’s significant to note that while trying to put together this post, I was unable to access the vitriolic letter that the president of Baby Einstein had posted, targeted at the CCFC’s leader, so inundated is the Baby Einstein web site; whether it’s media commentators, marketing communications professionals or parents flocking to the site, I can’t say. All that I can hope is that some marketing communications representative from Disney saw the letter, thought better of it and removed it from the site. Bits and pieces of the ill-advised posting are discussed here.
As a young parent, I have strong opinions about this issue, but I’m not willing to share them here. It’s up to each family how they operate their households and what they expose their children to; so long as that responsibility is undertaken with careful consideration and respect for the children involved, who is anyone else to judge what other parents do?
I’m confident in saying that entire research papers or books could be written on the complex marketing history of the Baby Einstein brand. It’s a conversation that delves into the sociological and philosophical responsibilities and roles of companies that market to children and their parents, and certainly, while interesting, extends well beyond the scope of this post.
As marketers, what simple lessons can we learn from this exercise? As another blogger so eloquently put it, “Why do brands make promises that they can’t keep or [worse] over extend an offering? The truth is, if it sounds too good to be true it likely is.”
If a company as large and powerful as Disney with legions of marketing professionals on staff can flub its marketing message and compound the goof by reacting angrily to its opponents in a public forum, then it can happen to any of us if we’re not careful. Carefully craft your marketing messages, make promises that you can deliver and always, ALWAYS, mind your Ps and Qs when you’re talking to the marketplace. Or suffer the consequences.
By Linda Forrest
The Huffington Post is getting a lot of virtual ink about the fact that they are A/B-ing headlines in real time – offering one headline to half their readers, another to the other half, determining which one is the most effective in getting people to click, and adopting it as the one that everyone sees. Brilliant use of real-time analytics and giving the people what they want.
By Francis Moran
Although many companies have embraced social media tools, especially for internal collaboration and customer interaction, their adoption by business has yet to cross the chasm into mainstream acceptance, according to a study by research firm IDC that was presented at this morning Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa. Similarly, IDC senior analyst Krista Napier said, “as much we hear about (social media tools) … it’s important to remember not everybody is on them yet.”
IDC’s numbers came from a recent survey of 200 business and IT leaders, most of whom could identify Facebook and Twitter as social media tools but many of whom could not see any business value in deploying them. When IDC asked the question, “What words come to mind when you think of social media?”, the most frequent answer was “Facebook” followed by “Twitter.” “Consumer” was the third most frequently stated answer, clearly indicating that businesses do not see social media as an effective business tool. This lack of enthusiasm was further reinforced by the next three most frequently cited answers, “distracting,” “waste of time” and “no business value.”
Still, the IDC study did find some companies were using such tools, although at insufficient rates to be considered mainstream. Using Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” model of technology adoption, IDC pegged all social media tools as still being in the early adopter phase or having just moved across the chasm towards mainstream market adoption. Leading the way were wikis, with 25% of respondents reporting their use, followed by blogs at 21.5%. Podcasts were being used by 17% of respondents while microblogging, which includes Twitter, was at a dismal 10.9%.
Pointedly, use of social networking analytics was at just 13.1%, which may explain management’s poor appetite for a tool that has yet to generally submit to rigorous measurement.
Respondents said security concerns were the biggest hurdle to greater adoption, followed by a lack of senior buy-in and decreased productivity. Those companies that were using the tools were using them most for departmental collaboration (37.5%), improved customer interactions (34.5%) and improved employee morale (30%).
A further set of numbers suggested that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Noting that use of social media by corporations is often lawless and ungoverned, often resembling “the wild west,” Krista said companies should develop social media policies. However, her research found that only 24% of respondents had done so while another 25% said they “planned to” in the next 12 months. Fully 40% said they had no such plans while the balance either didn’t know if they would or didn’t know what a social media policy would be.
The sobering reality that many consumers themselves have yet to embrace many of these emerging tools may also explain corporate reticence. In a similar study of consumer habits, IDC found that 64% of respondents said they used Facebook. The next most widely used social media tool, YouTube, was well down the adoption curve at only 14%, while Twitter was even lower.
Social media enthusiast Kelly Rusk tweeted me during Krista’s presentation to suggest that these numbers mean “there’s still opportunity for leadership in the space,” and I don’t disagree. The risk, however, is that marketers extolling the virtues of social media will find themselves too far out in front of both their corporate leadership and their markets.
By Linda Forrest
This Thanksgiving weekend, my family attended a pottery sale just outside my husband’s hometown. There were lots of beautiful pieces and the weather was perfect to wander in the outdoor tent, watch a potter at work and debate whether to buy this piece or that for Christmas gifts. How did we hear about it? We have good friends who attend every year and, having admired their bounty from this sale, we finally managed to attend this year. I expect it won’t be the last time we do so.
Similarly, we attended a pumpkin patch to select a gourd worthy of being our Jack-o-lantern. How did we select what patch to go to? We had a recommendation from friends about one they’d been to and liked.
As ardent movie fans, especially of the horror genre, my husband and I eagerly await the showing of the new horror movie Paranormal Activity in a theatre near us. The movie is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project in a number of ways, but for this blog’s purposes the most relevant is the huge word-of-mouth marketing campaign that the movie has undertaken, and the large numbers of people flocking to see it because they’ve heard from their friends and other taste-makers that it’s a rollicking, scary good time. The folks behind the movie used the internet to best advantage, asking for 1,000,000 votes to secure nationwide distribution for the film. It passed that mark on Friday. There’s nothing like a good horror movie around Halloween, so here’s hoping that the movie makes it to Ottawa in the next few weeks.
In today’s day and age where the proliferation of marketing channels and media messages is at an all-time high, it’s interesting to note that our purchasing decisions are still so heavily influenced by word of mouth. The best way to ensure good word of mouth is by providing excellent goods and services along with superior customer service. If you have these elements well in hand, your customers will happily spread the good word.
By Leo Valiquette
A trip to the grocery store that inevitably ended up being an extended exercise in reading and comparing nutrition labels got me thinking about the importance of paying close attention to how you are perceived in the marketplace, what you consider to be your competitive differentiators and how they stack up against the offerings of your rivals.
It all began with soya sauce, or rather, the quest to find a sodium-reduced option, soya sauce being one of those things we sometimes like to apply liberally with little regard for the hypertensive consequences.
The first thing I saw on the shelf was VH, a well known brand for all manner of sweety and salty Asian condiments. One tablespoon of its regular soya sauce has a whopping 48 per cent of your daily recommended sodium intake. Beside it was VH’s salt-reduced alternative, still at 32 per cent.
Next was Kikkoman, the mainstay that seems to have the restaurant industry locked down. Its regular brew has 38 per cent, while its reduced-sodium alternative has 24.
And then there was the humble President’s Choice store brand. Its regular brew (there wasn’t a reduced option on the shelf) has a mere 22 per cent. It trumped both of the major brands with its regular offering.
And while the store brand is generally cheaper, when I saw that number on the label, I didn’t even bother to compare prices before dropping the PC soya sauce into the shopping cart. Neither price, nor brand prominence, was relevant to me as a consumer. What mattered was that the PC brand gave me the better option as a matter of course, rather than trying to pander to my health-conscious concerns with an alternative product that still didn’t cut the mustard upon closer inspection.
The moral of the story? At a time when at least some areas of the economy are starting to turn around and and prospective customers have begun to spend again, it is crucial to listen to your marketplace and invest the time and effort necessary to ensure you are giving it what it wants, not just on the surface, but deep under the hood. Because you can rest assured that your customer base will still hold any expenditures up to the harsh light of scrutiny for some time to come.
Your product or service must deliver what it promises on the label, not to your satisfaction, but in accord with the perceptions and expectations of your customers.
