SOTB: You are what you eat and German stereotypes edition

Who cares about data? I'm back to the weekend for SOTB, as it was crowded out this week by other blog posts and work. Here's my roundup of recent noteworthy events and posts. A dual theme week: Food and Germans:

1) WTF at Whole Foods (doing the cultural math): Grant McCracken
Grant systematically dissects the cultural inappropriateness of Whole Foods CEO's John Mackey's views on health care given Whole Food's position as the leader of the food and health revolution. His op-ed in the WSJ has led to a boycott campaign and tends towards the cannibalistic. It's his baby, after all.

2) How TrueBlood Drew Blood (Vampires and Why We Love Them): Grant McCracken
Another post by Grant. This one about the success of the HBO show True Blood. He wonders why vampires have become so popular.

3) Further unraveling of pool chair reservations: Market Design
This may only be funny/interesting to those British readers who have first-hand experience of staying in some package-holiday-hotel in Spain and never getting to sit near the pool because the Germans got up at 6am and put towels on the best seats to reserve them. Now Thomas Cook is offering Germans (only) the chance to make advance reservations for said chairs.

4) VW Ad Review: Only Part of the Chaos Over Car Accounts in Ad Land: David Kiley
VW of America has put its $200+ million account into review. David Kiley looks back at some of the Crispin work including this spot:

5) Sh*t my dad says: brandflakesforbreakfast
Now with over 160,000 followers on Twitter, shitmydadsays has shot into orbit. (It's only been going since August 3rd.) Food-related sample: "Don't touch the bacon, it's not done yet. You let me handle the bacon, and i'll let you handle..what ever it is you do. I guess nothing." Funnily enough, I've been doing something similar for a while, capturing the (thankfully mostly G-rated) sayings of my daughter, Emmi (born in Germany)

6) You are what you eat in pictures

Fridge wars from: Ben Kunz

New Good Humor logo from Brand New

Apparently real (and German) from Ruth Mortimer

That's it! Back soon with more stories from the world of brand strategy. More thoughts and comments also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

At least the ankle wasn't broken

Photo: Laurel Fan (Flickr CC)

Most issues related to health care fall safely outside this blog's frame of reference. But pricing is close enough for me to share a recent experience.

My wife recently went to the emergency room for what turned out to be a badly sprained ankle rather than the break it could have been.

We just received the bill. It's for $2,742 for the general services provided at the hospital plus $719.47 for the X-Ray. I estimate that the total time we interacted with various people at the hospital (from administrators to nurses) to be no more than 15 minutes (and it was probably closer to 10). Just the general services alone equate to a billing rate of $10,968 per hour.

Which just goes to show how completely detached the charges for care are from the actual costs. In fact, when we went to the hospital, we were not paying for the visit and the care received per se--we were just presenting an opportunity for the hospital to pass on some of its overall running costs.

With our employer insurance, we are in the fortunate position as we look at the bill to just shrug, say "that's crazy" and move on. In this pricing system, we, as the consumer, play no active role and can have no hand in helping to regulate the market.

Size matters: The verdict on the Angus Third Pounder

Photo: me

Fresh back from a trip up the coast to Oregon where we drove in our car down the Avenue of the Giants, home of some of the world's largest trees; rode in a dune buggy up and down the Oregon Dunes, the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America and, in another size-related moment, sampled the now nationally released Angus Third Pounder at a conveniently-placed McDonalds.

So my thoughts on this burger, the first McD's has launched in 8 years? A hit? Or another Arch Deluxe?

1) Taste: Thumbs up from me on taste and, based on a quick search of other reviews (1, 2), that's the consensus. But the Arch Deluxe burgers also tasted pretty good (apparently) and that wasn't enough to save them.

2) Positioning: The Arch Deluxe was positioned as a sophisticated burger for the adult palate, sold on taste. In its first set of ads, McD's illustrated this positioning, perhaps unwisely, by having kids say how yucky they were. Well, that didn't work. This time around, the Angus Third Pounder is positioned primarily on the basis of its 1/3lb size with its premium quality given an Angus seal of approval. That seems a much better place for McD's to be and one that separates the Angus burger from the rest of McD's hamburgers without implicitly disparaging them.

3) Competition: McD's is late to the larger-size burger market. Carl's Jr. has its Six Dollar Burger, Burger King has its Steakhouse Burger (and, before that, its own Angus Burger) and, of course, other slightly-less-fast food restaurants all have their own versions. Now that McD's is diving in as well, a real battle is shaping up. The most likely result of this battle is that this market segment will grow (like the consumers). From McD's perspective, the earlier presence of others with even bigger, pricier items provides it some cover against Fast-Food-Nation-like criticism for the calory inflation of these products and their premium price point.

4) Timing: How about the timing of this national launch coming as it does on the heels of the McCafe launch and in the middle of a recession? Overall positive, I think. Even though these burgers are more expensive than its other burgers, they are competitively priced against equivalent sized burgers at other restaurants and McD's is still a cheaper meal out than almost anywhere else. As far coming soon after the big investment in McCafe, I think that the Angus launch is actually an important and complementary investment. As Denise Lee Yohn pointed out in a recent article in QSR, McD's focus on coffee had presented an opportunity for its traditional competitors to try and gain ground on the food front. Launching the Angus burger now helps rebalance McD's efforts and block competitive inroads.

5) Operations: One of the biggest advantages of the Angus vs. the Arch Deluxe is that it has not required the installation of expensive new equipment. The new burger is prepared on the same cooking equipment as the rest of the burger products. Franchise owners, who have already been on the hook for all the new McCafe equipment this year(estimated at $100,000 per store), would surely have pushed back hard if they been asked to invest in any more equipment. Even if the Angus fails completely it will not be the disaster that the Arch Deluxe became.

Conclusion: The Angus Third Pounder has been in test market for two years and McD's must have the data and confidence that this new product is going to hold its own and warrant the launch investment. From a taste, positioning, competitive, timing and operations perspective everything checks out. The ultimate test will be whether McD's can attract enough of the target market (young men) to its store despite its relatively stronger family appeal. As for me, I don't need to be indulging in 590 calorie burger experiences, however good they taste. Luckily for McD's, that doesn't matter. I'm definitely aged out of the target market.

SOTB: Birthday edition

Brand Mix is two years old today! 191 posts last year, down a bit from the first year but still not too bad. Put the two years together and it adds up to about a book's worth of words. Some of my favorite posts from Year Two:

1) Summer reading: Watching the English (July 2009)

If you 1) Are English and wonder why you act the way you do or 2) Have spent time with English people and wonder why they act the way they do, this great book provides all the answers.

2) What do you think about the Baked! Lays makeover? (May 2009)
Does the creation of a Baked! line of products work? An interesting product architecture question without an easy answer.

3) Why do popular brands have such incredible staying power? (May 2009)
An analysis of all the theories about why consumer brands like Tide and Heinz Ketchup have stayed popular so long. "Mother's knows best" and "conditioning" are two of the leading contenders. Better quality isn't.

4) How long will the nation's shoppers resolve to stop spending? (January 2009)
I am not as convinced that the current recession has forever changed our shopping habits as some people believe. Jimmy Carter thought the same thing back in the 70s recession and look how wrong he turned out to be.

5) How about disposable brands? (December 2008)
Create brands with intentionally short lives to address the problem of short life cycle of fashions and some technologies. That was the theory I floated back in December. Pros and cons evaluated.

6) Decisions made with 10% logic, 90% emotion (October 2008)
In politics, the candidates that appeal to logic and reason always lose out to those who go for the emotional angle. What works in politics probably works for soap and dog food too.

Plus favorite video of the year: Penguins (BBC)

That's it! Back soon with more stories from the world of brand strategy. Also to be found, from time to time, on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

SOTB: It is now edition

The data have spoken. Midweek recaps are preferred so midweek (or Thursday, actually) it is. Here's my roundup of recent noteworthy events and posts:

1) Breakaway Brands from 2009: Special K, Hallmark, PayPal among the winners: DailyFinance
Difficult to see what Special K, Hallmark and PayPal have in common but they've all made the top 10 in this year's Breakaway Brands list. This list is developed by Landor using the BrandAsset Valuator (BAV) brand database with those making the list showing sustained increases in brand strength over a three-year period.

2) Twitter backlash foretold: Reuters Blog
Death, taxes and the once hot eventually becoming not. The certainty of Twitter going out of fashion is being foretold by Gartner Inc in its 2009 “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.” Other technologies about to hit the downslope from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu). Twitter is ahead of them, moving into the "trough of disillusionment" if you believe this fancy chart.

3) Walk: Johnnie Walker (via Thought Gadgets)
In the spirit (ha!) of earlier, great work by Hovis, Johnnie Walker celebrates its history with this video, remarkable for its single uninterrupted take featuring Robert Carlyle (of Trainspotting fame):



4) Back-To-School Basics (Part 2): The Keyhole
Summer's almost over and back-to-school sales reports are coming in. Robert Passikoff has a nice summary here of winners and losers. Not surprisingly, retailers selling cheap essentials have done fine (Walmart +10%) whereas those selling higher-priced non-essentials have suffered (Best Buy -5%). Despite the recession, online continues to grow.

5) Health care napkin #3: the plans: Digital Roam
Dan Roam turns his visualization talents to illustrating health care issues on the back of his famous napkins. (You can download the whole sequence here on SlideShare.) Meanwhile Jon Stewart hosted a debate on death panels, John Baldoni offered advice about speaking to an unruly crowd and Ben Kunz provided perspective in the battle for the middle (independents) .

6) Cash For Jabs: Dim Bulb
Let's stay with health for the last entry. How about being paid to get a flu shot? Taking a short break from branding bashing, Jonathan Salem Baskin says if the government is prepared to give out $4,500 in its cash-for-clunkers program, why shouldn't it pay people to get a flu shot? It would be a good thing for the country so why not?

That's it! Back soon with more stories from the world of brand strategy. More pontification also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

Can you love the Shack? RadioShack tries a makeover.

Photo: Landor

I'm rooting for RadioShack if for no other reason that it sports an identity that Landor developed back in the 90s. It's also encouraging to see that, after years of cost-cutting and in spite of the tough economic environment, RadioShack is tweaking its business model and investing in a new marketing campaign to reinvent itself. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the new approach has some serious flaws:

1) Business model/customer experience: RadioShacks are not big stores. That's part of the business challenge. Where Best Buy can make money selling big TVs with big margins, RadioShack has to find something else, something smaller. Mobile phones fit the bill and are already driving 1/3 of sales and that's before a new deal with T-Mobile. The challenge I see with this expanded role for phones is that it will crowd out the rest of the business, especially the traditional business of accessories and replacement parts. It's already hit-and-miss whether you actually find the part you are looking for when you go to a store and, with less space, there'll be less chance. And who, going into a store to find a cable stupidly left in a hotel room or some part for something that you should really be getting rid of anyway, wants to be power-sold a new and unwanted phone? Perhaps the plan is to get out of this traditional business or, move that business completely online?

2) Call us "The Shack": The part of the brand reinvention that has generated the most interest and comment is the plan by RadioShack to refer to itself as "The Shack" in marketing promotions. The logic behind the idea is that Radio sounds old-fashioned and that "The Shack' is more friendly. But brands need to be careful going down this path. There's a contrived familiarity about The Shack that is similar and just as bad as "The Hut" (a shortened version of Pizza Hut). It's we the customer that get to decide whether we want to give a brand a nickname. Can you imagine sending an email to all your contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn saying: "Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that, from now on, I'd like you to know me as (insert over-friendly nickname here)?"

3) That doesn't matter. Call us "The Shack" anyway: There's another problem with using "The Shack." "The Shack" already has meaning to people and none of these various meanings are particularly helpful to the cause or consistent with the message. What does it mean to you? Shaquille O'Neal? The Love Shack (B52s)? An actual wooden shack? The Shack is just not a particularly classy, quality kind of word. Focusing on it just reminds people of that.

So, overall, I'd say I'm not particularly optimistic that the new campaign is going to work. What do you think or are you all-Shacked-out already? I think I've said all I can on this issue what with this and, last week, two press interviews on the subject. Thanks to both journalists for calling me and selecting quotes that made some sort of sense:

1) RadioShack Plans Reinvention: Douglas MacMillan, Businessweek
2) RadioShack would like you to call it 'The Shack': Theresa Howard, USA Today

SOTB: Midweek edition

Apparently you, my dear readers, have different and better things to do on the weekend than read my blog. At least that's what the data say. Or perhaps you just aren't interested in the weekly round-up that I've been posting on Saturdays. Let's see which it is. Here's a midweek round-up of weekly things of interest:

1) 10 Promotional Stunts That Horribly Backfired: Yahoo! Finance
From the Cartoon Network bomb scare to KFC running out of chicken in a chicken giveaway, a list of some of the most notable promotional mishaps.

2) Top Ten Branded Social Media Nightmares: Inventorspot (via BrandWeek)
While we're in this mode, how about the top 10 social media snafus? This list features all our favorites including United Airlines and its guitar, Motrin's headache and Domino's unfortunate added ingredients. (Note to self: Top 10 lists are always fun to read--you should do one.)

3) RadioShack Plans Reinvention: BusinessWeek
Lots of commentary, mostly negative, about Radio Shack's plans to refer to itself as The Shack in upcoming marketing promotions. Picked this one from BusinessWeek because it includes a quote from me. For a different take, read Fritinancy's post.

4) Temptation More Powerful Than Individuals Realize: Science Daily
"Whether it's highlighted in major news headlines about Argentinean affairs and Ponzi schemes, or in personal battles with obesity and drug addiction, individuals regularly succumb to greed, lust and self-destructive behaviors." People have much less restraint than they think they do, according to new research from the Kellogg School of Management. I'm tempted to say more but I won't.

5) Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space: Marginal Revolution
As Tyler Cowen says, Henderson et al. have come up with a clever idea using satellite data on lights at night as a proxy for GDP growth. It's being used to measure things like the impact of changes in agricultural productivity on African city incomes.

6) Instantly Transcribe a Whiteboard with Your Cameraphone: HarvardBusiness
Gina Trapani reports on two new services that capture all your whiteboard brilliance on a cameraphone. Simply snap a pic, send it to Evernote or qipit and get back a transcript. Brilliant!

That's it! Depending on the results of this test, see you same time next week or back on the weekend for more stories from the world of brand strategy. More pontification also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

Day of the Clones: Either a brand is different or it is dead

Photo: adactio (Flickr CC)

And after that gentle title, Simon Silvester launches into:

"Tom is a brand manager. His approach is thoroughly professional. He’s searching the world for best practice, and is bringing it to his brand. He’s also benchmarking his brand against competitors, making it look as good as they do. And he’s optimizing his communication plans, ensuring they’re best-in-class. What’s the problem? ‘Seeking best practice’, ‘benchmarking’ and ‘best-in-class’ sound important. But they all mean Tom is copying his competitors. And because his competitors are professionals too, they are copying Tom back. In today’s world, everyone is searching for the same best practice. Everyone benchmarks against each other. And everyone optimizes their communications plans. Everyone is copying each other. And so their brands are becoming clones."

He points out that in a world of perfect information where everyone has access to the same quality research and online information, there's a tendency for Tom and everyone else in an industry to come up with the same insights at the same time, launching the same products with the same key messages.

Which is a problem because it's differentiation that's drives brand strength and it's differentiation that's threatened by analysis that puts everyone on the same road instead of the road less traveled.

Getting the balance right between points of parity (things that you must do to be perceived by consumers as credible in your category) and points of difference that can help you stand out from the rest has always been a tough marketing challenge. I think that Simon's report is a useful reminder that we should get so besotted by the power of sophisticated tools that focus on points of parity (like benchmarking) that we forget about the trickier challenge of finding ways to be different.

What do you think?

Sources:
1) Day of the Clones: Simon Silvester (pdf)
2) Three questions you need to ask about your brand: Keller, Sternthal and Tybout

SOTB: Science edition

All about science and technology this week--fast swimsuits, augmented ads for pads, implanted cell phones and more:

1) Cavic riffs on Phelps ahead of 100 fly showdown: Yahoo! Sports
During the Beijing Olympics, Speedo reigned supreme with Michael Phelps and its other LZR-suited swimmers routing the competition. How quickly things change. Arena and Jaked have leapfrogged Speedo and now its their swimmers who are dominating the world championships with Speedo forced to allow its swimmers to use competitor suits. Michael Phelps has stayed loyal but may very well lose the 100 fly rematch as a result. UPDATE: he won anyway.

2) The Science of Decision Making: Science Friday
"Why someone would decide on Coke vs. Pepsi could mean millions of dollars in the soda business?" A discussion about the science of decision-making that covers such topics as whether your genes can influence split second decisions and how emotions can influence the way you decide. The discussion reflects the continuing interest in the intersection of psychology, economics and neuroscience.

3) Traffic and the price of anarchy: kottke.org (via Marginal Revolution)
"The collective optimization of individual driving routes by drivers using realtime traffic maps slows everyone down. That is, everyone picking the "fastest" route on the map results in overall slowdowns." If GPS is going to tell everyone which way to go, that's going to jam things up worse than if no-one had a clue.

4) What blood-powered cell phones mean for the future: Thought Gadgets
How about a cell phone that slides under your skin and is powered by blood? What will this and other cyborg-like developments have for marketing?

5) P&G Tries Augmented Reality: Adweek
P&G is testing the use of augmented reality in a new campaign for Always Infinity. If you hold up the ad to a web cam, you can watch a white rabbit pop out of a magician’s hat with the words, “irresistibly soft.” I don't have a web cam so I'm not sure how impressive this is. (Here's an article in Brandweek which asks whether augmented reality is the next big thing.)

6) GE's Augmented Reality demo: doobybrain
Augmented reality in action--GE's Smart Grid demo:

That's it! See you here on the blog or on Twitter (@martinjbishop) for more stories from the world of brand strategy.