The Company Your Company Could Tweet Like

Earlier this week, the Man Your Man Could Smell Like (whom his fans affectionately refer to as "Old Spice Guy," and who seems to have a mysterious connection via a parallel universe to actor and former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa) spent two days personally responding to Tweets and Facebook posts addressed to him.

Old Spice Guy is not the first to converse with Facebook fans and Twitter followers on behalf of the company he represents. However, he is the first to carry on that conversation through over 150 YouTube videos recorded and posted over two days while in a bathroom, wrapped in a towel. Here's a sample:



In other response videos, Old Spice Guy answers fans' questions, gives shout-outs to celebrities, offers manly wisdom, sweetly reassures skeptics, and even proposes to a man's girlfriend for him. But you'll have to find those videos yourself.

As of this writing, each video has received between 33,000 and 1.9 million views. Most of the videos have received a few hundred comments each. And a few received comments like, "I went out and bought Old Spice TODAY because of this video!"

The Old Spice brand image has come a long way in a few short years. Not too long ago, Old Spice seemed...old. My grandfather used Old Spice. My guy friends did not.

But now, Old Spice seems young. Strong. Robust. Adventurous. Manly. Daring. Thanks in large part to a well-executed campaign surrounding Old Spice Guy, making the claim that wearing Old Spice can help men to smell like a "ridiculously handsome" man who rides horses and whales with equal ease, uses wolverines to apply body wash, bakes gourmet cakes in a kitchen built with his own hands, and wins medals for exotic car-throwing.

Old Spice has created a new image for itself with clever videos that make hilariously absurd boasts of manly strength. Because it has created content that people enjoy watching, it has been able to reach audiences and start converting viewers into fans. And now its amazingly funny personalized video responses have furthered those fan relationships.

I'm not saying that your company needs to start conversing with customers via individual YouTube videos of a man in a towel. In fact, you probably shouldn't. But you should look for ways to connect with customers in an enjoyable way that surpasses expectations and aligns with the brand reputation that you want to have.

If personalized video response tweets is the way for your company to do that, then go for it.

How Clever Is Too Clever?

Marketers like to be clever in their communication.

When they develop brand messaging, or an advertising campaign, or a product name, they want to create something that (1) attracts attention, (2) reinforces the desired "personality" of their brand, and (3) sticks in peoples' minds.

Sometimes marketers muster all of their cleverness and creativity to produce marketing communications that truly get noticed, and truly stick, and truly remind people of the brand. When I think of successful marketing efforts, I think of brands and campaigns and slogans like these:

• Twizzlers. "Makes mouths happy."
  Did this slogan leave us with any doubt that Twizzlers were a delightful thing to eat?


• Fuddruckers.
  The name itself is so funny to say - and the selection of burgers and toppings so fun and delicious (ostrich burger with peanut butter, anyone?) - that this restaurant chain is pretty unforgettable.


• GEICO. "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance."
  After seeing that random, Australian-sounding gecko and hearing that slogan over and over and over again, who could forget that GEICO can save you money on car insurance?

When these brands and campaigns delight consumers and stay in their brains, the cleverness and creativity of their marketing teams has paid off.

But sometimes, cleverness actually sabotages the marketers' goals. A few examples:

• The Oneders.
  This was the original name of the band for whom Tom Hanks' character served as manager in the 1996 movie That Thing You Do. The band members tried to be clever with their name by replacing the "won" in "wonder" with the number "one." Unfortunately, their audiences didn't get it, pronouncing the name as "The Oh-NEED-ers" instead of as "The ONE-ders." Later in the movie, the band dropped the clever spelling and renamed themselves simply "The Wonders."


• The Brew.Net Internet Cafe
  This is the name of a coffee house in my town - a rather good one, actually - that offers free wi-fi (hence the allusions to both coffee and Internet in the name). But customers - and potential customers - never seem quite sure how to pronounce the name. Is it "The Brew Net" (sounds like "brunette")? Or "The Brew DOT Net" (sounds like a web URL)? Here again, cleverness obstructs customers' pronunciation. And if they can't pronounce it, how can they tell their friends about it?


• Super Bowl commercials - generally speaking.
  How many times do we see brilliant, extreme, hilarious Super Bowl commercials - ones that we share with our friends and laugh about for weeks - but which leave us with absolutely no recollection of which brand the commercial was promoting. Was that a Hyundai ad or a Nissan? Sprite or Sierra Mist? If the viewers can't remember the brand name, it doesn't matter how much they loved and laughed at the ad.

In marketing, clever can be good. Clever can make your brand surprising and remarkable and memorable. Or it can make your brand get lost in the confusion or hilarity of your messaging.

If you must be clever, make sure that your cleverness reinforces your brand, rather than distracting from it. A clever ad that leaves viewers without a clue about your brand is much less worthwhile and effective than a non-clever ad that clearly tells viewers who you are.

Marketing Lessons from Christmas Cookies

In my family, December is the time to bake Christmas cookies. Snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies, chocolate no-bake cookies, peanut blossoms (aka Hershey's Kiss cookies), chocolate chip cookies, kolaches, sand tarts, Christmas tree-shaped almond cookies, sugar cookies, and raisin-filled cookies were all standard holiday fare at my parents' house and my grandparents' house when I was growing up.

When I moved off to college, I started extracting my favorite childhood recipes from the memories and cookbooks of my mom and grandma. In that process, I was amazed to learn how many of those delicious recipes were not ancient family secrets or mysteries unveiled in a gourmet cookbook. Instead, the instructions for many of those wonderful treats came from the packages of the ingredients.

The recipe for peanut blossoms came from the back of a bag of Hershey's Kisses. The recipe for Chex Mix was printed on the side panel of a box of Chex breakfast cereal. The recipe for chocolate fudge was found on a jar of Kraft marshmallow creme. The recipe for pumpkin pie was revealed on the wrapper of a can of Libby's pumpkin pie filling.

I think I shall be forever grateful to the makers of these food items for sharing the recipes that have become family traditions.

And really, it is a fabulous idea - brightening your customers' celebrations by telling them of wonderful ways to use your product. Consumers will not buy a product (or at least they will not continue to buy a product) that they will not use. Sharing a delicious recipe - for free, since consumers could plausibly glean the recipe from the outside of the package while in the store, without ever purchasing the product - provides valuable information to consumers, and gives them a reason to keep purchasing the product.

Food items are not the only products for which manufacturers and retailers share helpful hints. Arm & Hammer shares myriad uses for baking soda (i.e. cleaning, air freshening) on its signature orange boxes of the product. The Home Depot and Lowe's both share Do-It-Yourself tips on their websites.

How can your organization share with people - for free! - ways in which they can use your product?

A Burst of Creativity

Customers are tired of boring. They are tired of mediocre, status quo products, services, and marketing. Successful brands are those that are remarkable, creative, and exceptionally good at something. Because people are attracted to great work. And consumers want to identify themselves with something outstanding.

So, is your brand exceptionally good at something? Does your design team (or supply chain management, or finance department, or HR) exhibit superb innovation? Are your marketing communications creative, reaching customers in a fun way?

Or does it seem that your creativity has dried up?

Perhaps your company is like many - it's a good company. But not exceptionally good. Not great at anything. Not noted for creativity or innovation or the pursuit of excellence.

Do you need a boost to get those creative juices flowing again?

While it may be difficult to teach someone how to be creative, it seems to me that one of the best ways to stir up creativity is to immerse oneself in the creativity of others. Surround yourself with creative people and creative work.

Visit websites that showcase creative advertising, design, and marketing - try creativity-online.com, www.luerzersarchive.us, www.oneclub.org, and adsoftheworld.com for starters. Check out what innovative companies are doing - and not just in your own industry. Look at artwork - on Flickr, at artists' studios, in art museums. Search YouTube for old Super Bowl ads, funny videos, and top-rated tv commercials. Ask your friends to tell you the funniest thing they've seen, heard, or experienced recently. Read the comics. Tour a cathedral or historic mansion. Sit at a park and watch children playing. Lie on the grass and look at cloud shapes.

Surround yourself with creativity and excellence. Be inspired. Pursue greatness.

A Return to Soap Operas?

We are seeing a welcome shift in the marketing world - a move away from trying to capture customers by shouting at them with ads and commercials, and a move toward gaining fans by creating simply excellent content. Certainly we are still inundated with traditional "interruption marketing" (to borrow the term from Seth Godin) in magazines and newspapers, on tv and billboards and the Internet. But more and more marketers are letting great content speak for itself. They are doing and creating remarkable things that get people talking. (To learn more, read Seth Godin's Purple Cow, if you haven't already.)

I think the rise of smartphone apps and customer-created media (a la YouTube) has aided this trend toward remarkable content. Marketers are communicating via things that can be enjoyed as entertainment even without a brand message.

There is Gillete's uArt iPhone app that lets you add facial hair to a photo of yourself, then shave it into designs of your choice. There is the microsite for Coke Zero, which is really a video game in disguise. And how many company-created YouTube video phenomena do we see now? Like the Frosty Posse from Wendy's.

I see this trend, and I like it. This model inspires us to deeper levels of creativity. It makes me wonder whether we will soon see a huge reinvention of traditional advertising, such that we no longer see magazine ads and billboards and tv commercials as we have them today. Instead, will we see pure content - art, music, videos, games, short stories, poetry, etc. - "sponsored" by companies? For example, instead of tv commercials between our programmed viewing, will we see fun, 60-second short films with a simple, one-line message at the end: "brought to you by [insert brand name here]"?

It would be as if advertising (at least tv and radio) were coming full-circle, returning to the soap opera model. Soap operas got their name because a consumer products company (i.e. Procter & Gamble, who may have been the first?) would sponsor the radio or tv show. They would promote their cleaning products (i.e. Ivory soap); hence the name. If we see more pure content coming from marketers, it will be like a return to our roots.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see where advertising heads in the future. With the rise of the Internet and other "new" media, there has been talk of whether traditional advertising is on its way out. I can still see television, print, and radio ads as having a place alongside (instead of being replaced by) interactive, social media, viral marketing, etc. But these traditional advertising media may look very different in just 5-10 years than they do now.