Subways: Boring or Beautiful?

Last week, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority unveiled a project that will make subway riders' commute a bit "brighter."

That project is the newly completed art installation by the late Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. The piece, entitled "Whirls and Twirls (MTA)", is an arrangement of brilliant porcelain tiles on the wall above the staircase at the 59th Street-Columbus Circle subway station. The piece is the first of three Lewitt works commissioned by the MTA; the other two are compass rose floor designs. (Read more about the work at www.nytimes.com.)


Photo by Ángel Franco, New York Times


The piece rather reminds me of another bit of art and culture that was added to the NYC subway recently - without the direction of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. One evening in November 2008, Improv Everywhere, a volunteer group that "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places," opened an "art gallery" on the 23rd Street subway platform. See their video below:




Both of these initiatives took a typically dirty and dreary part of New Yorkers' daily life - riding the subway - and made it interesting and beautiful. They brought joy (or in the case of Improv Everywhere, "chaos and joy") to the public. At no cost to the public.

What can your organization do to brighten up the lives of your audience? How can you add beauty and delight and surprise and laughter to your customers' experience? What part of your product or service is taken for granted as dull or distasteful, and what can you do to change it?

And don't make your customers bear the cost of this change. Take it out of your marketing budget. The repeat business of your delighted customers and their friends will be more than enough recompense for any extra expense.

What They Don't Know Can Kill You

Over lunch earlier this week, my friend Howdy and I had an interesting conversation about the hoopla surrounding President Obama's speech to America's schoolchildren on September 8.

During an interview with student reporter Damon Weaver in August, President Obama announced that on September 8 he would be making a speech to schoolchildren across America. By August 21 the press had picked up the story, reporting also that the President's address was to be accompanied with a curriculum for teachers to use with the speech. The curriculum suggested that teachers engage students with questions like, "What is the president trying to tell me?", "What does the president want me to do?", and "What new ideas and actions is the president challenging me to think about?"; and with assignments such as "writ[ing] letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." The actual contents of the speech were not released.

By September 1, conservative parents, educators, and activists were up in arms.

For adults already concerned by more liberal shifts in our nation's politics and education, the speech could only mean one thing: an attempt by President Obama to push his left-wing agenda on the children of America. And the accompanying curriculum - typical of any critical-thinking exercise in American schools - must, of course, be a ploy to further brainwash the children. How does the president have the right to preach to our children and dictate curriculum in our schools?

CNN, among other news channels, covered the story of conservatives' outrage. Among conservative bloggers, a flurry of blog posts arose, displaying such titles as, "Obama's next effort: a Children's Crusade?", "Beloved Leader to Begin Indoctrination of Youth", "Dilemna: [sic] What's a mom to do? Creepy President to deliver speech to all public school children!", and "September 8, 2009: National Keep Your Child at Home Day". These bloggers compared President Obama to everyone from Kim Jong Il to Adolf Hitler to Fidel Castro.

Finally, on September 7, the day before the President's speech, the White House released the text for the incendiary address.

It was perfectly harmless.

The speech was a pep talk to America's students, encouraging them to be responsible, to work hard in school, to do their homework, to respect their teachers and their parents. It was a message that we all want our children to hear. And it was to be delivered by a man who, for some children, might be the only decent role model to whom they would listen.

This incident, says my friend Howdy, is a perfect illustration of a sagacious maxim: What they don't know, can kill you.

When people distrust an organization (as they generally distrust the government), and they don't know the full story on what that organization is doing, they will make it up. And usually, what they make up is wrong, and is the worst-case scenario, and is quite damaging to the organization's reputation.

Had the White House released the text of President Obama's speech from the beginning, concerned conservatives would have had no room for alarm. No room to assume the worst. No room to let their imaginations run wild with the horrible propaganda the president might be pushing. The administration could have avoided the entire public relations mess.

Howdy asked me whether I think the same principle holds true in the private sector. I think it does. Obviously, the public does not need to know all the inner workings of a company, just as we do not need to know all of our nation's military secrets and other classified information. But when a company unveils a new initiative, or recalls a product, or releases a similar big announcement, they should be prepared for full disclosure of the situation. Especially in situations of PR crises, companies should be wary of sending cryptic messages.

Remember, people will make up what they don't know. Don't leave the public to make up the parts that are important. Give them the facts, so that they can't give you their wild speculations.

Don't leave room for people to make important stuff up. What they don't know can kill you.

Exceeding Expectations

Yesterday a friend and I visited the Watters Creek mall in Allen, Texas, for the first time. While we were there, we stopped in a store called Francesca's Collections.

Francesca's is a nice little boutique, well-decorated (as Anthropologie stores are well-decorated, but not in the same style), selling bags and jewelry and female fashion. And I liked the clothing. Trendy but classy. But given the tendency of such boutiques to be well outside my price range (I do not typically like to pay $150-$300 for a blouse that will be out of style in six months), I was fully content to simply browse without purchasing anything.

And then, Francesca's delighted me and exceeded my expectations. Out of curiosity, I checked the price tag on one of the sweaters I was flipping through. It was $38, not $138 as I had expected. I checked the price tag on a blouse - $28. Jeans? $98.

The prices were reasonable! Through the decor and product selection, Francesca's had created a beautiful customer experience of quality and luxury that bespoke an exclusive, expensive boutique. And yet their prices were in a "normal" range, not expensive designer shop range.

Delightful.

Beautiful customer experience + Prices within my budget = Store that I will eagerly patronize

Viral Marketing Failure du jour

As a general rule, I shun Facebook applications. I dislike the way they clog up your profile, and I dislike the way they require you to allow them to access all of your Facebook information (which is usually unnecessary, and is not used for reasons that benefit the end user).

But today I saw in my News Feed that a friend had taken a Facebook quiz entitled "What Does Your Day Mean?" which purported to report the implications of being born on a particular day of the week. It sounded interesting (though I would never take it seriously). I was curious. I decided to add the application and take the quiz myself, just for kicks.

As was to be expected, the application required me to allow it to access all of my Facebook information. Okay. But then, an epic viral marketing failure: before it would allow me to take the quiz, it asked me to invite my friends to add the application, too.

Forget it.

The creators of the application are making an attempt at viral marketing by asking people to tell their friends. But they are going about it all wrong. You cannot force someone to recommend your product. And you cannot expect someone to recommend your product if they have not yet tried your product. You would not expect someone to recommend a movie they have not yet seen, or recommend a clothing designer whose clothes they have not yet tried, or recommend a restaurant at which they have not yet eaten.

You must let customers experience your product first. And their experience with your product must be remarkable enough that your customers want to talk about it. They cannot help but talk about it. Talking about it benefits their friends, and builds coolness points for themselves. (Thanks, Seth Godin, for your great book on ideaviruses like this.)

If you force people to talk about a bad product, the opposite happens. They hurt their friends; they hurt their trust with their friends; and they hurt their coolness points. People do not want to do that.

I did not want to invite my friends to add the application, and, in so doing, to stamp my recommendation on a product I had not yet tested. Neither did I want to spam my friends with one of the Facebook application invitations which I so despise. (Disclaimer for my friends who have sent app invitations to me: I still love you. You are forgiven.)

Granted, this application did have a "skip" button to the "invite your friends!" plea, for those users who take time to search for the button. But the inconspicuousness of the button makes the invitation stage seem unavoidable. And if the user does skip the invitation stage, they will likely never recommend the app to their friends.

If these Facebook application creators truly want to enhance their viral marketing, they need to save the "invite your friends!" request until the user has already completed the quiz, or joined the cause, or played the game, or done whatever the app does.

Let the user experience the product first. Then give them an easy way to invite their friends. If they like the product, they will often be more than happy to tell people - especially through the click of a button on a social media site like Facebook.

'Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost?

I intended for this post to be a contemplation of the line, "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all," and whether that statement holds true outside of human relationships. Specifically, I planned to question the veracity of that statement when it comes to the discontinuation of a favorite consumer item. As consumers, do we feel thankful to have enjoyed a product in the past, although we cannot buy it now? Or would it have been better never to have experienced that product, and so to be ignorant of what we now miss?

But, alas, poor scholar of English literature that I am, I had forgotten who penned that famous line. And so, of course, as a conscientious blogger, I did a Google search to discover to which poet I should attribute the quote.

The answer? Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The line comes from Canto XXVI of Tennyson's poem, "In Memoriam A.H.H.," which Tennyson wrote as an expression of his grieving process after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. (God bless Wikipedia.) The full stanza reads:

"I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

The "loved and lost," then, refers to building a friendship, and then losing the friend to death; it does not refer to the dissolution of a romantic relationship, as per the frequent misapplication of the line.

A few stanzas prior (in Canto XXIV), Tennyson shares some other reflections which caught my attention. Canto XXIV reads:

"And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?
The very source and fount of Day
Is dash’d with wandering isles of night.

If all was good and fair we met,
This earth had been the Paradise
It never look’d to human eyes
Since our first Sun arose and set.

And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein?"

That third stanza - "And is it that the haze of grief/Makes former gladness loom so great?/The lowness of the present state,/That sets the past in this relief?" - wonderfully captures the phenomenon of nostalgia, I think. Nostalgia comes to me, personally, when I think of Christmastime. I have these beautiful impressions of my childhood Christmases being so full of love and warmth and laughter and family and joy and all being right with the world. I love Christmas. And yet, at each annual family Christmas gathering, I never quite experience the same feelings that I hold in my memory. I can never make the real life Christmas celebration seem quite as magical as the ones I remember.

I do not believe that Christmas has changed so very much. I do not believe the love of my family has changed (although new family members have been added, and others passed on); I do not believe that my grandma's cooking has changed (in fact, I know it has not); I do not believe that Christmas in my family is anything less than it ever was. I think it is that nostalgia: that "the lowness of the present state...sets the past in this relief" - even if lowness the present is not really so very low.

Perhaps this nostalgia is the cause of consumers' deep aversion to losing something they once had. (I wrote about this in my blog post of 19 July 2009, "Responding to Loss Aversion.") When a product is available, consumers may enjoy it, but they may not always love it. Take the product away, though - as when Coca-Cola replaced the classic Coke formula with New Coke - and there is a public outcry. Granted, Coke is an American favorite; but perhaps the public appreciated Coke even more when it was gone than they did when they freely enjoyed it.

And hence the popularity of vintage clothing, and television reruns, and antique toys. But these items now never seem as grand as we remembered them to be. The memory of them seems brighter than the real thing. And when a company remakes an old favorite movie, or television show, or toy, the remake is almost always a disappointment to those who experienced the original.

I suppose, then, that my question for marketers ought not to be, "Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" but rather, "Is it better to bring back the thing loved, or to let it remain eternally unmarred in memory?"

Merge TV and Internet? Please Don't.

Television industry veteran Michael Kokernak authored a MediaPost Video Insider article yesterday entitled, "Why Not Merge TV and Internet?" He reflects on the transition to digital cable and proliferation of TV content available on the Web, and opines that "[w]e...should probably be concentrating our efforts on how to combine the Internet and the digital television experience so consumers get content delivered through one seamless 'platform.'"

I am not exactly sure what Mr. Kokernak has in mind when he talks of "combining" Internet and TV into "one seamless 'platform,'" and, sadly, the rest of his article does not serve to clarify much. But if by "combining [the two into] one seamless 'platform,'" he means transforming the television set into a Web browser and vice versa, I don't think it is a good idea.

From a consumer's perspective, television and Internet serve two very different purposes, and it seems unwise (if not impossible) to try to literally combine them. The Internet should complement television, not replace it; just as the Internet has not replaced books and magazines, but rather has been added to a vast array of communication media. Certainly, e-books, blogs, online journals, and various wikis offer similar (if not identical) content to many books and magazines; however, the advent of these electronic versions has not meant the death of printed materials, because the usage situations are different. "There is a time for everything."

Successfully integrating media means that television content and Internet content should reflect and supplement one another. A friend of mine at TMP Directional Marketing, a local search marketing firm, once told me that every time a client launches a new billboard, for example, she adds the words and phrases from the ad as SEO keywords, so that the audience can effectively search online for more information based on the billboard they saw. The same should be true for TV content - media companies and advertisers need to make available (and easily searchable) complementary Internet content before they launch any newscast, show, or commercial on TV.

Integrating media does not mean that consumers want their televisions to act like the Internet, or vice versa. As pertains to the television industry, consumers use the Internet primarily to gather information related to something they heard or saw on TV, or to access content that they missed during its original TV broadcast. They use the Internet actively and up close. Consumers use their television sets for entertainment (or for passively absorbing information) - they want to sit back, relax, and watch a show on their big-screen HDTV half-way across the room. Consumers don't want to have both on the same physical platform. I don't want to always watch TV on my 15" computer screen; nor do I want to click around the picture on my big-screen TV in the same way I click around the Internet.

Hopefully that is not what Mr. Kokernak intended at all; hopefully I misunderstood his use of the words "combine" and "merge." Plus, he has spent his career in the television industry, and founded a company - BackChannelMedia - that allows tv-watchers to click icons on the television screen that send emails with links for additional information to the viewer. Perhaps that is closer to his vision for "combined" Internet and television. And perhaps his market research shows that this vision truly is a hit with consumers.

The Odd Couple: a magazine and a fuel company

Little League Baseball has an official sports drink. The Super Bowl has an official beer. NASCAR has an official everything - tires, batteries, insurance, soft drinks, shaving products, heartburn remedies, and 45 other "official [items] of".

And now, a magazine (actually, three of them) have an official fuel. That's right, three magazines have an official fuel. Why? Well, when your magazines make their money by talking about motor vehicles, they use a lot of fuel. The magazines (all owned by Hachette Filipacchi) are Road & Track, Car and Driver, and Cycle World. The official fuel provider is Shell.

Having an official fuel will come in handy for these mags - and not only because of the advertising dollars. All three buff books involved in the partnership conduct road tests of cars, trucks, and/or motorcycles. The magazines have frequently used Shell gasoline and Pennzoil and Quaker State motor oils (also owned by Shell) in these road tests; now all parties can extend and leverage this relationship.

According to an article in MediaPost's Marketing Daily, Shell gets extensive benefits for the price of its sponsorship: its logo with an "official fuel of" tag on the mastheads of the three magazines, as well as on data panels for all road test articles; co-branded ads in the three magazines' print, online, and radio broadcast versions; and access to Hachette's market research data, provided by survey management firm Vista Studies.

Road & Track, Car and Driver, and Cycle World all benefit from Shell's sponsorship funding, naturally. In addition, they are able to guarantee that all of their road tests use Shell nitrogen-enriched gasoline, specifically.

The co-branded ads featured in the magazines are rather droll, too. Each features a Shell engineer smiling wryly as the camera catches him hiding his Road & Track magazine (or Car and Driver, or Cycle World, depending) in an open Petroleum Engineering textbook.

All this to say that strategic business partnerships have room for innovation. Perhaps your company can find an official snack food. Or official office supplier. Or official airline. Or official hotel chain. Or official search engine. Or official deodorant. Or official social networking platform. The opportunities are, apparently, endless.