Month: December 2008

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage

Lenovo’s “Customer of the Year” — Constantine von Hoffman (for threatening to tell people we delivered a ThinkPad to him ahead of schedule) — has posted his annual list of the top marketing boners, blunders, bloopers, etc.. I strongly recommend a full visit, my favorite is Vista toilet paper and Lolita brand beds.

1 Ford features “Space Oddity” — a song about astronaut suicide — in new car campaign.

2 Framingham State College uses the word blah 137 times in a 312-word fundraising letter.

3 Disney (multiple entries): Bans kids from DisneyWorld restaurant; Changes “It’s A Small World” to “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”; and Sells “High School Musical” panties for tween girls with the phrase “Dive In” on them.

4 Woolworths (UK) launches Lolita brand of beds for young girl

See the rest below ….

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage.

Favorite new clamming blog

Andy Buckley — I discovered this one this morning on Cape Cod Today. His bio:

“Novelist, politician, photographer, game designer, master mariner, clamdigger and investigator, Andy Buckley is an eleventh-generation Cape Codder with a Renaissance flair. His Tours of Cape Cod (Schiffer Books) will be published in May 2008. Read Andy’s Monomoyick column in the Cape Cod Chronicle and visit Monomoyick on YouTube and on Panoramio. Andy can be emailed here.”

“When I bought my commercial shellfishing license towards the end of the May 31 deadline, the number of my license caught my attention. It was low. In years past, if I waited this late to fork over the $200 to the town, the number was close to six hundred. Instead this year, it was about half of that.

“It shouldn’t be too surprising. With the proliferation of aquaculture in neighboring towns and the region, as well as the discovery of a large bed of ocean quahogs in Nantucket Sound, the price of littlenecks clams has fallen from over 20 cents a piece to below ten. Often, four hours or less of work could bring close to a hundred dollars in the summer. Not a bad way to supplement income from other work, and pay the high cost of living in Chatham.

Buckley’s Blog.

He blogs at http://www.monomoyick.com

High tide in Venice

Amazing photo series on Boston.com showing the floods in Venice earlier this month.Nice Red Bull branding. It’s Extreme.

General Mills’ Pssst… is a Weak Stab at Branded Community | paulgillin.com

Paul Gillin takes General Mills to task for its branded community. Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?

“I just signed up for General Mills’ Pssst… membership club because I was interested in seeing how a big consumer products company assimilates all that we’ve learned about online communities and applies it to a super-brand site (plus, I love Lucky Charms!). It’s still early, but this site is off to a very weak start.

Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration with GlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.

Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution. I would not have launched the site in its current condition:

General Mills’ Pssst… is a Weak Stab at Branded Community | paulgillin.com.

Rob Enderle on the “perfect” laptop: Lenovo X301

Rob Enderle writes some strong praise for the Lenovo X301 — arguably the “perfect” notebook PC. I personally favor the X200 as I have no need for a touchpad, but Rob offers up a strong comparison of where Lenovo stands vis the competition. A tough, but fair critic, Rob’s assessment is great validation for Lenovo:

“I started using the new Lenovo ThinkPad X301 early last week, and Forbes had branded its predecessor the “Perfect Laptop.” What is fascinating is that Apple has on its board Al Gore, the most powerful “green” politician in the world, and Lenovo originated in China, a place that has a very poor environmental record. However, it is Lenovo that is the Greenpeace poster child and Apple its apparent enemy.

“Apple came out with the MacBook Air — an incredibly thin, sexy and largely impractical notebook, while Lenovo brought out the ThinkPad X300, which shared the Air’s size but otherwise was almost the polar opposite. The X300 wasn’t anywhere near as attractive but was a product you could truly live on, being vastly more practical. The X301 improves on the X300, having more performance and the option of an amazingly fast 128-GB hard drive. I’m a huge fan of these solid state drives; they are dead quiet, use little power and have blindingly fast read rates. Unfortunately, they are also very expensive, but darned if they aren’t worth it.

“If you replace the optical drive with a bay battery, battery life jumps from a marginal 3+ hours to 7+ hours, and if you carry a spare battery, as I have been doing, you jump to 10 hours or more. This helps make the product vastly more practical, and it contains built-in AT&T (NYSE: T) Latest News about AT&T or Verizon Latest News about Verizon WAN capability as well, so you can assure connectivity.

“The MacBook Air is arguably the most attractive notebook in the market, while the X301 is the closest to overall perfection. The market tends to favor appearance over practicality at the moment, but the true perfect laptop would be one that was as good looking as the Air and as practical as the X301. We’ll see if Apple or Lenovo gets there first.

E-Commerce News: Tech Buzz: Apple vs. Dell vs. Lenovo: Got to Love Choices.

A Cotuit Christmas

Santa came to Cotuit yesterday, arriving on the Fire Department’s boat around 4 pm under grey skies from the southeast, on the wind, rolling into the town dock where about three hundred excited kids and parents greeted him with great pleasure and enthusiam. I got off the water from my first (and perhaps only) row of December just in time to shower and change and make it down to the dock for the happy occasion.

I stood on the beach and shot some video; Daphne took the Nikon so the photos are better than usual. I met the one other Cotuit blogger I know of, Paul Rifkin, and we chatted until the great event began.

Santa walked up the hill to the village park where he sat in his throne, was blessed by Reverend Nicole, and then ignited the village Christmas tree which I can see from my reading porch.

My buddy Chris drove people around the village in his dump truck filled with hay bales then came over for a dinner of braised short ribs (from the Balthazar cookbook), roast potatoes, salad, and cranberry and apple pie.

Whereabouts week of Dec. 7

Monday – Dec. 8 through the end of the year …. Cotuit. No travel for me until CES (Still need to get approved for Vegas, but sounds like I’ll need to be there) in early January. This is homefire time — stay close to home, lots of Lenovo conference calls and projects, a few social roadtrips off the Cape to see friends, Xmas parties, but no airplanes for the next three weeks. And as Martha Stewart says, “That’s a good thing.”

I planted close to 400 spring bulbs today, in the rain, in the sleet, in the snow, in the mud. Every year I hold off on buying the tulips, etc. until it is so late the nurseries and garden shops are ready to toss them in the dumpster. Then I swoop in, getting them for half-price or better. And bury them in trenches around the flower beds and rose gardens. No delicate one-bulb-at-a-time crap. No sir. Dig a hole six inches deep, empty contents in wheelbarrow, up end a bag of fifty bulbs into the hole, stand everything pointy side up, dump the wheelbarrow on top, smooth it over and think thoughts of tucking little bombs of joy away for four months. It too is a good thing when Farch (F$%king March) ends and the cruelest month of all, April starts to tease.

Have to say I was in an awful grey funk all day today. Almost a physical depression that kept me off the erg and that tried to drive me to the couch for a few hours of fetal position therapy. I rallied and took the dogs for a beach walk in the snow, bundled up in my waxed Filson’s parka, fingerless gloves, the whole nine yards of inclement weather get up. Came home and wished there was something cooking, but there was not, so I camped with my Kindle, worked through some more Shadow Country and felt further blue that I can’t write novels as remarkable at Matthiessen.

Oh well. Enough self-pity.Monday is a coming and this is actually a week of productivity I look forward to.

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money” – The Atlantic

Gao Xiqing is the president of the China Investment Corporation, a Duke educated attorney, who established the Chinese securities and exchange system and now, in his current role, controls a huge amount of Chinese capital, capital invested in a lot of American debt.

We spent some time together in August during the Olympics but we didn’t talk economics — mostly sports. In the current Atlantic Monthly the best American journalist writing about China, James Fallows, interviews Gao. I highly recommend it.

“People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.

“We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this? After we are gone, you cannot just go to the moon to get more money. So, forget it. Let’s change the way of living. [By which he meant: less debt, lower rewards for financial wizardry, more attention to the “real economy,” etc.]”

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money” – The Atlantic (December 2008).

Dour Marketer — what’s first? Get your ruler.

One has to start somewhere in getting one’s act together in a down economy, so I suggest the first thing to get in order is online metrics. You must measure the heck out of what you do. Hunches are for people who can afford to be sloppy.

If you are a dour marketer in a small or medium business, online metrics means Google Analytics because it is free. Deal with it, learn it, read the book, become a disciple of Avinash. Sure, when your moving $50 million in ad spend a year though an ecommerce engine generating $500 million in revenue, then you can worry yourself with industrial strength measurement systems like Omniture (which in full disclosure we use). But before you get all revved up to go do something because action is better than inaction, get yourself to Amazon and buy these two books:

  • Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is the best analytics blogger out there. He works at Google. His blog, Occam’s Razor has been in my blogroll since, well, since it started.
  • Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics: Brian Clifton. I don’t know Brian, but I do known enough about Google Analytics to know it can be a very powerful tool in the right hands.

Good buddy and thrifty marketer Mark Cahill turned me onto Google Analytics and it runs in the background of this blog. I want to underscore – I am a retarded web analytics person; the true practitioners I know like Jim Hazen, Ranjit Kulkarni, Esteban Panzeri, are extremely insightful, well trained and inspired in their mastery of the tools and the strange world of first party cookies, EVARs, tags and conjoint analysis.

There are a ton of good metrics resources — if, as I suspect, you are a protean dour marketer and wearing several hats — or, at the very least, interested in learning all aspects of digital from SEM to SEO to WOM to SMM, then you won’t have the time to become a metrics ninja. But it is the first step on the road to enlightenment as everything needs to get “tagged” at some point.

Next post, I’ll expand the reading list to include more titles.