Christien Meindertsma spent three years researching the end uses of the range of raw materials that derive from pigs. Then she photographed the products that include a little bit of pig. Paint. Bullets. Beer. Sandpaper. Marshmallows. Beauty masks. To name a few. Her charming talk on the book follows.
I don’t know about you; I often have problems with Vimeo videos. You may have to play it through without volume first to buffer it locally and avoid the stop/starts.

TEDxAmsterdam: Christien Meindertsma from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

A simple book concept beautifully executed. Let me say that another way: the more clearly you define your project the more clearly you will communicate it and the greater your chances of success.

In this case, Christien’s marketing success allows her to powerfully comment on interconnectedness. Ordering the book and can’t wait for her next project.

The invention of the disposable razor is a celebrated marketing story. Invented by Bic, not a shaving company. The reason Bic got into this market was that they were competing with Gillette in the portable cigarette lighter business. The portable razor was a way of undermining a competitor’s profitability. I digress. My point was, innovation very often does not come from market leaders. It’s largely because they’ve developed a particular way of looking at the market.

I recently had occasion to wear makeup, while shooting a video and I looked so good I wore the stuff again the following day. Just for the hell of it. And I liked it, so there.

Men wearing makeup during the day still carries a stigma and it’s a tiny market. A GQ survey in 2005 reported that “92 percent of men would not wear makeup even if it guaranteed them a more fulfilling sex life.” OK, well there’s 8% of us who’d wear flowerpots on our heads.

I think it’s quite possible men’s makeup will become common but it needs a marketing twist unlikely to come from the big cosmetic brands.

Instead of trying to market foundation, a product as symbolically feminine as brassieres, companies should market men’s suncream with added foundation. Guys are happy buying suncream (in summer at least) and once your metrosexual 50 year old sees the difference that foundation makes, it’s down the slippery slope me old hearties.

Of course, getting a shade of foundation that matches your skin tone is critical if you don’t want your mates in the workshop to beat you to a pulp. So the sampling experience needs to be right. Here’s where I think the Internet plays a role. Men are not likely to want to be seen publicly in the cosmetics department. I think they’ll prefer to experiment at home with a sampler.

I suspect the cosmetics companies are too entrenched in the beauty paradigm to address the male market; the major sunscreen manufacturers – Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co – can own this business. As heterosexual men become older, vainer and less concerned about being labelled homosexual, this market will grow. ‘Ray for men’s liberation!

That’s not me in the photo but doesn’t he have nice eyebrows?

A brief overview of perhaps the least understood marketing concept: positioning. It’s what you need to get clear on before you start advertising.

Imagine you’re a wealthy business person and your birthday party is coming up. You’ve decided to book a comedian to perform for your friends and you can afford any performer in the world. Who do you choose? Maybe you come up with a short-list of people you think are equally funny: Billy Connolly, Woody Allen, Tina Fey and your next door neighbour, Tim, who does amateur stand-up.

I put it to you that you have a clear mental picture of where each of these people sit in the comedy landscape.

Who would you choose if your friends were mostly Jewish psychologists? Who would you choose if they were mostly people working in politics? If they were mostly blue collar workers? Each performer occupies particular mental territory in your comedic imagination. That territory is their positioning. Connolly is positioned strongly as ‘outrageous’ and ‘irreverent’; Allen ranks for ‘sophisticated’, Fey ranks for ‘sex appeal’ and ‘current affairs’.

Probably you’re unlikely to choose Tim because you recognise that in the minds of the audience he doesn’t have a profile. He hasn’t established a positioning in the market. He might be as funny as the rest, but for the important attributes of ‘famous’ or ‘credible’, he doesn’t rank.

We build up these mental pictures of where people sit in relation to everyone else – different people stand out in different areas.

Same applies to business positionings. What marketers try to do is mark out mental territory and make that territory as proprietary as possible. Because if our positioning is powerfully clear, it will jump into the mind of the consumer easily.

Some positionings are more valuable than others. A surgeon would rather be positioned highly on ‘technical expertise’ than ‘lives close by’. So choose a positioning that is meaningful to your target market.

Pick the absolute most concise positioning. If you are trying to position your widget as ‘convenient’, ‘value-for-money’ and ‘long-lasting’ you’re going to confuse the market. Be single-minded. You don’t have a $50 million budget. (And even if you did…)

In all cases we’re trying to latch onto territory that we can own. Territory that becomes identified with your brand and no-one else’s. It’s hard to own the positioning ‘quality’ if everyone in your industry says they are the best quality. And they probably do. Choose something that you can own and take into account your budget and your competitors’ budgets. You might want to own ‘convenient takeaway’ but you probably can’t match McDonalds’ budget.

Bind the positioning to your brand name so that when customers think of that positioning, they think of your brand. If you are the top-of-mind product you are likely to get the first phone call the customer makes.

Can you successfully communicate that positioning in your advertising? If you’re saying ‘better quality finish’ than your competitors’ furniture, you’d better make sure the finish looks better in your photography than theirs.

Finally, your positioning should reflect who you are as a business. If your advertising says ‘reliable’ and the customer experience is not that, you’re in trouble. If their experience with you reinforces what you’re promising, you’re unusual. People will talk about you. Otherwise you’re just another bullshit artist. I mean advertiser.

Summary
1. Choose a positioning that is majorly meaningful to your target market.
2. Make it incredibly concise. One idea. Three words. That kind of concise.
3. Make sure you can own the positioning, given your competition, your budget and your advertising message.
4. Make sure your positioning is a reflection of the experience you actually deliver.

Went to Sexpo and met Fiona Patten, the Convenor of the Australian Sex Party. I think this is going to be successful and influential. Set up by the Eros Foundation, the sex industry lobby group, it’s attracting the support of commercial operators within the sex industry. That means they’ll have a physical distribution channel through which they can promote membership. I gave Fiona my unsolicited opinion (people love that) – I think their strategic focus should be on gaining members. This is because the mainstream parties actually have very low membership numbers. If the Sex Party get to the point where membership numbers match either of the major parties, they will legitimise themselves in people’s minds. Nobody wants to vote for a party that nobody votes for.

Their web site is already attracting 35,000 uniques a week after just six months and they are more pro-social media than the rest. Okay that’s not difficult. Join the Facebook group here.

They also need to establish in people’s minds that what they’re chasing is some representation and balance in the Parliament. Not a take-over. They need to present themselves as reasonable and normal people and they probably should consider knocking off some of the hard edges on their policies, which are pretty strongly anti-religious. That won’t help.

I wish to point out that I’ve written about this without a double entendre which seems to be beyond most media folk.

Two products at Sexpo I thought were interesting. Sportsheets are a clever product. Restrain your partner using velcro pads that adhere to the sheets. So much easier than those infernal ropes.

Party High Pills is a new business selling herbal euphorics manufactured in Hamilton Hill (in a state of the art garage?) from ingredients sourced from New Zealand and Israel. Good quality presentation; they’ve done an excellent job. Although the danger levels are almost certainly lower compared with Ecstacy and amphetamines I think they’d be wise to amp up the reassurance on their web site about toxicity testing. I’m sure there’s a substantial market there so at some point, someone needs to fund a clinical trial. Meanwhile, will instigate individual sampling for purely research purposes.

Having already suggested that the Australian Advertising Industry is generally clueless about marketing their own services on the web I thought to monster a couple of other industries. So I had a look at the web sites of 50 West Australian wineries – about 15% of the industry. I checked each for sensible use of Title and Description tags, site maps, animation and links. Here are the findings:

Comment: Some pretty sites; 3 Drops, Moss Wood, Beckett’s Flat and Matilda Estate; shame no-one is seeing them. Honestly, what’s the point if you’re not getting traffic?

Some fine examples of animation kitsch too by the way. If you’re into that sort of thing (then you’re as sick as I am): Amberley Estate, Brookland Valley…

Although my analysis here does not give the whole picture, it suggests a lack of web marketing sophistication, both in the area of web strategy and search engine optimisation.

The larger businesses were only better than the small businesses in one respect; more traffic and more incoming links. They showed no greater online marketing skills.

Businesses can improve their web rankings with a few hours’ work. Much can be done by adding text content that includes the keywords that people type into Google. If you’re selling ‘grenache’, make sure you have a web page, Title and Description tags that mention ‘grenache’. Yell out if I’m going too fast.

Companies wanting to make the web a serious part of their marketing mix should develop a web strategy. This may focus on particular export markets, distribution channels or niche market segments. In almost every case, it will require the company to develop content that is relevant/entertaining/useful to the reader.

I ran the first Web Promotion SHOCK seminar yesterday and it was poorly attended.

Getting the marketing right is a process that almost always involves risk and failure. I remember a guy who got promoted at Colgate-Palmolive while I was working there. He’d launched a new product into test market. Got the formulation wrong, the packaging wrong and the advertising wrong. But the market research showed why it failed and the company then knew what to do. Risk, failure, knowledge.

In the case of my seminar, I believe I got the proposition wrong and the creative wrong, so I need to go back and do some more testing. I think I’ll do this with AdWords. But where I failed spectacularly was in my attempts to get some PR; promotion that has an editorial component, is unpaid and carries the implicit endorsement of a third party.

I spoke to the Breakfast DJ of a commercial radio station who said he’d be prepared to do an interview. Right demographic and all of that. He asked for an outline, so I sent him some suggested questions and how I would respond. It was light and entertaining stuff about Google and web promotion but I proposed to mention the seminar. He emailed me back saying this: “this is an ad and I will get my ass kicked by management”. He explained that because I was charging for the seminar, company policy deemed the content commercial. Obviously they don’t want to encourage that, given that they’re in the business of charging for advertising. So the interview did not take place.

I had a similar response from the local newspaper. This is commercial; can’t do a story.

Here’s what I don’t understand. Every radio station does interviews with authors. Authors are blatantly promoting their books. Commercially. What is the difference between an author promoting a book and a speaker promoting a talk? The policy that is currently in place gives free publicity to large book publishers many of whom have the capacity to pay for advertising but it withholds free air time from the whole speaking industry; small operators with precious little advertising budget. The clear intent is to make editorial comment unavailable in an effort to extract paid advertising. The listener misses out on good content and the radio network restricts itself to larger advertisers.

Ironically, our public television and radio network, the ABC, have exactly the same approach: free plugs for authors and nobody else. Of course they won’t take your money for commercial advertising. So the effect of our current media structure is to shut the commercial sector out of public discourse.

Society would be positively affected if the public media lightened up about commerce or the commercial media lightened up about editorial. I’m suggesting there is room for another media network; one that preferences good stories and good content, irrespective of commercial content. Create a media channel accessible to professional consultants and businesses. One that does not rule you out of public discourse because you charge money for a product or service.

Here is a problem; here is a solution. It costs money. Get over it.

Mischief. The first twelve Advertising Agency web sites I looked at are making no effort to attract web traffic. Either they have as much work as they want or they don’t believe that potential clients search the internet for advertising agencies. Maybe they rely on being in the Yellow Pages.

All sites run fancy Flash animation; none of them deprecate properly for people with JavaScript turned off. The full Flash sites are extremely annoying for users. Hit the Back button in your browser while visiting The Brand Agency, Campaign Palace or Naked and get thrown out of the site. Oh good, I get to look at that animation all over again!

None of the sites have Title tags that include any reference to ‘advertising’, ‘media’ or ‘marketing’. This is part of the reason why none of their sites are found when you type “advertising agency” into Google.

None of the sites have Description tags. Which means that when you type ‘saatchi‘ into Google it tells you this about the company:

Saatchi & Saatchi PR in Romania has been appointed by Alpha Bank, a leading name in the financial sector, to handle its PR account. READ MORE > … Compelling content for English-speaking people interested in Romanian bank Public Relations – alas, I’m one of the few …

Saatchi’s site was broken when I visited; none of the links worked. I tried IE and Firefox and re-downloaded Flash but still nothing. I emailed their webmaster. Waiting on a response. Update: links now working.

When you type GPYR into Google it tells you this about the company:
home; about us · work · services · tools · contact us · brand partners · careers. George Patterson Y&R is Australia’s newest (and oldest) advertising agency …

‘Wunderman‘ gives you this:
Welcome to Wunderman : Welcome to the site for Wunderman, the original direct marketing agency. To get our conversation… Welcome, welcome. Should be called Doorman, not Wunderman.

Clearly none of the agencies understand that you can control the way Google presents your search result. Many of the sites don’t work if you omit the www; this can be fixed with a simple re-direct. And it seems none of them know how to get a full Flash site properly indexed by Google, thereby increasing web traffic. I digress.

DDB have a one page site that allows you only an email link. Times are tough. The design of many sites, such as BMF and Clemenger has not been updated in years. The gratuitous use of sound is particularly 1990s.

JWT, Grey and Singleton Ogilvy make up the twelve.

It’s as if they created their sites before Google was invented.

Oh! Found one traditional agency who know what they’re doing: Marketforce use the words “marketing” and “advertising” in their Title tag and have written one Description tag. As a result, they come up at #12 when you search for “Advertising Agency”. A bit of tweaking would put them in the top couple.

I’m running some half-day seminars on web promotion shortly in Perth. If you’d like to pre-register, give me a yell.

The Fortified Sustainability Project; it should have been a warning that they might not come up with brilliant names.

The business of re-naming fortifieds that have used Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian names for over a hundred years has begun – sherry and tokay are to be renamed apera and topaque. I read about it in The Age in an article by Lisa Port, who will shortly have to find herself a new surname.

Other names that were considered (I”m not making them up):

For sherry – Solzay, Solperi, Aperire, Alphrette

For tokay – Millifera, Russet, Muscadelle, Allirea

‘Millifera’ sounds like bacteria and ‘russet’ like something dogs get.

Naming by committee is problematic. In the case of ‘apera’ they’ve tried to allude to aperitifs, to position the wine as a pre-dinner drink. ‘Topaque’ just sounds like an awkward imitation of tokay; the “let’s just cross our fingers and hope they don’t notice” approach. Ironic that the Chairman of the Project, Colin Campbell, said they wanted names that “would invigorate those products because obviously we’re not looking to just sustain the sales, we’re looking to increase sales”.

He said they were looking for new names which are exciting, emotive and switch people on. Well let me belatedly volunteer a few of those:

Sherry: Spank, Viola, Gothic, Cheek, Curve
Tokay: Toast, Trick, Trouble

Because they’re not invented names you probably wouldn’t get a trade mark; do you desperately need a trademark? Champagne never had one.

And if you absolutely had to have the security of a trademark, could you not be a little more adventurous? What about Shhhh or Sh~*~? I haven’t decided whether that last question mark is part of the name.

The New World wine community has been completely done over by the Europeans. If the New World had cooperated and created international replacement names they could have seriously challenged in these categories. As it is, each country will determine their own replacement names and export marketing is doomed by fragmentation.

I don’t think a replacement name has been decided on for port. On current form, they’ll invent a short word that sounds like port with a European note: Fort or Forti.

But that does not deliver on “exciting, emotive and switch people on”. Trial. Quiet. Lounge. 100. Duel.

Perhaps you’ve been listening to Rupert Murdoch’s Boyer Lectures? He has an awful voice but he says a lot of sensible things – as you can imagine, he has the benefit of an unusually wide perspective. His dislike of elites and authority mark him as an Australian; his enthusiasm for change explains why he lives where he does.

Rupert was optimistic about newspapers. He understands that newspapers are a brand, that they are about trust and that their oxygen is the reader. Using that brand, he argues, News Corp will deliver relevant information in whatever technology format is appropriate. Spot on.

Much hand-wringing by journalists nonetheless about the death of journalism now that the Rivers of Gold (classified advertising), are flowing to the Internet. The old newspaper business model said, we will provide the reader with journalism and companies will pay for advertising so they can access those readers. But readers now search Internet databases; a far better system for the classifieds buyer. Simultaneously, the Internet is competing with newspapers for eyeballs. What is to be done?

What newspapers have is credibility, so they should look to use this competitive advantage in subject areas which are perceived as valuable. Where credibility is currently lacking.

This is most feasible in areas where newspapers have not traditionally trodden. Take Search Engine Optimisation for example; a subject close to my economic heart. The web is full of SEO experts, all giving away free content and trying to up-sell you into subscriptions. The problem is, you don’t buy a subscription unless you have a high level of trust. You with me? Would I pay $100 a year for the opinion of one expert? Hmmm. Would I pay $500 for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal’s Best in SEO? If it has 20 contributors and a WSJ banner, I probably would.

Would people pay $100 for a subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Guide to Selling on the Internet? Many would. Would business people pay $500 for the New York Times’ Internet Networking subscription? Yes. The Economist’s Web Marketing? The Guardian’s Internet Relationships? The Mirror’s Best Bargains?

Newspapers should be looking at the e-book market and turning some of those products into premium, branded subscriptions. They should develop new products which deliver expert content in technical and specialist areas. You can’t justify charging for ‘news’ or ‘opinion’ or ‘business’ because they are established as free info but anything new is fair game. Industry specific subscriptions will also work if the content is extensive.

Your mainstream publication then carries normal articles plus pointers to Subscription Only articles, both on the web and in printed form. Newspaper management are not used to new products. They’re used to the monolithic publication. But the splintering of news into specialist subscription publications is a logical response to losing your advertisers. In effect, the newspaper could become the Editor of the Internet.

Crikey and others have written about the lack of direction at Coles.

Here are some suggestions, without the benefit of any market research information.

1. Use social software and market research to solicit the best ideas from the shop floor. Coles employees skew young and are comfortable with this technology already but they are not engaged with the challenge. Every store has people with good ideas who (I suspect) have never been asked their opinion. Let staff rate each others’ ideas and reward the best ones. You have the biggest workforce in Australia. If they want you to succeed, you will.

2. My hunch is that Coles should be re-positioned as LOCAL, generating pride at store level as to their separate identity; re-stating COLES as COLES ARMADALE, COLES MOSMAN PARK etc. Stores would source and promote locally grown produce and provide opportunities for in-store community advocacy. There will be substantial goodwill in ‘giving Coles back to the community’. It’s more about the people than shiny new stores and stock levels.

3. Coles Fruit & Veg should lead a deep restructuring of the farming industry; explaining food quality and wastage issues to consumers. Conspicuous, closer links with farmers.

4. Run a high-profile campaign in the short term called ‘Turning Coles Around’ in which you promote your desire for public feedback. Suggestion boxes on every checkout. Create www.turningcolesaround.com.au, publishing staff and customer suggestions. Making Coles an underdog is a strategy that will work very well in Australian culture.