Pepsi to Skip Super Bowl Ads in Favor of $20M Social Media Campaign

I never thought that Pepsi would be the first large Superbowl advertiser to realize that spending $20M on 30-second Superbowl ads might be better spent elsewhere.

Good for them.

Policing the Holiay Inn brand

InterContinental Hotels Group has been in the process of enforcing strict guidelines for its Holiday Inn brand of hotels for a while now and is requiring its individual property owners/managers to make upgrades to adhere to its brand guidelines. The chain expects to lose about 300 lodgings by the end of 2010 according the an LA Times story.

A brand represents a set of expectations and Holiday Inn guests have not exactly always known what to expect. Maybe they would check into a property with outside access rooms and a 1970's style room layout with a stale smoke smell or maybe they would get a modern room complete with comfy workspace and flat screen TV.

Holiday Inn is doing a wise thing by telling its customers what they can and should expect and then telling individual property operators to make sure they deliver on those expectations. There may be some pain in the short term but in the long run owners and customers alike will benefit by a strengthened Holiday Inn brand.

How to Plan Your 2010 Marketing Budget

Many marketing professionals are currently pulling together their marketing plans and budgets for 2010.

If you are faced with making some hard choices because of a weak economy then let me offer some advice.

Attempting to spread your limited marketing investment across as many different media as possible is dangerous. Depth in media is absolutely essential to get the results you want.

All too often people spread their marketing dollars across too many different media and dilute their message and their success. They believe that "being everywhere" to create awareness is the most important thing they can do.

They are dead wrong.

These marketers would be more successful if they focused on mastering a few media first and then made the bulk of their marketing investment in those proven media rather than trying to be everywhere. Just because you test on a small scale with one medium and find a winning campaign that is ready to be scaled-up within the same media does not mean that it is time to roll it out into many different media at the same time. Different media might deliver very different results.

Concentrate on the few media channels with which you are successful. Experiment and measure until you have the return on investment solidly working in your favor and then pour most of your allotted marketing dollars into those media while testing new media on a smaller scale. Master each one of your media channels one at a time and then add them to your mix one at a time until you find the optimum mix and balance.

A winning message in one medium might not translate into a winning message in a different medium. Don't gamble on unproven media because most of the time you will be disappointed. This is especially true when it comes to social media.

If you are just starting with social media marketing (SMM) do not assume that social media is simply a new channel or set of channels through which to push out your traditional marketing messages. Social media requires engagement, transparency and a little experimentation to understand how it works. Traditional marketing rules do not apply in social media because in social media you do not control your message or the conversation about your brand. Others do.

If you are expanding your marketing toolkit in 2010 to include social media for the first time, then it is especially important that you take your time to understand the environment and that you do not sacrifice some of your proven marketing tactics in order to shift to the perceived low-cost nature of social media marketing. You might not like the short-term results because social media marketing takes plenty of time and engagement before you'll begin to see results. It also takes plenty of experience with it before you figure out the rules and can intelligently make decisions about how to make deeper marketing investments into it.

In 2010 you must make some hard decisions about your marketing investments. Try some new things but don't try to do everything. Trying to spread your marketing dollars as far as they will go will be a huge mistake as will be shifting the majority of your efforts into social media when it is a new arena to you.

Inspired marketing?

I'm glad to see that our tax money that was used to bail out the car companies is being invested wisely for truly inspirational marketing that is effective, innovative and uplifting.


Not.

Brands must help human brains

Image from ClipArtHeaven.com

Humans like things that are predictable. As such, one thing that a brand must do is act as a proxy for an expected future event, reward, benefit or feeling. A strong brand is something that brains can use as a shortcut to represent a set of expectations. Each and every brand comes with a set of expectations and implies some predictable result.

Your goal as a brand builder is to fully understand what those expectations are and then deliver on them so people see your brand as something predictable and therefore something that does not require a great deal of future analytical thought. If your brand delivers on promises of value and meets expectations every time then people will simply see your brand as a highly predictable, low-involvement decision and they will choose it more often than not.

Once you do not meet the expectations, however, then people's brains will start to think analytically again and you'll have to convince them to choose your product over the competing ones all over again.

Book review: Marketing Public Relations: A Marketer's Approach to Public Relations and Social Media

Great for students and marketing practitioners alike.

I bumped into Gaetan Giannini virtually in a Facebook marketing group and he graciously offered to send me a review copy of this book. I'm very glad we had that chance encounter because this book is a comprehensive guide to modern public relations and marketing that others need to know about.

This book is a textbook but it should gain traction as a modern day playbook for any marketing or PR professional. Gaetan resets the entire public relations foundation in a new landscape of online social media where you have access to the connectors, gatekeepers and media like never before.

Covering topics from the new PR model to press kits, social media, the marcoms mix, media relations, crisis management, creating and pitching stories, networking with bloggers, blogging as a PR strategy and media planning & measurement (just to mention a few), the book delivers plenty of actionable ideas that the reader needs to consider in order to function in the modern media environment in which many of the rules have changed and old media models have been tossed out the window. This book is quite literally a comprehensive course in modern PR and marketing and even seasoned professionals (maybe especially seasoned professionals!) will learn new tricks.

I highly recommend this book.

...and to return the favor of the gift of this book, I'll gladly send my copy to the first U.S.-based student who contacts me and requests my copy. (The book was claimed within hours.)

Recall another blow to Toyota's reputation

The story in the L.A. Times details Toyota's battles with quality problems and how those problems might tarnish the brand's reputation.  The Toyota brand has earned a reputation as a high quality, trouble-free automobile over the years but the recent problems fly in the face of that perception.

Part of having built a strong brand, however, typically means that consumers will be more forgiving of problems when they arise as long as the brand owners acts swiftly and definitively to rebuild and reinforce what the brand means in the minds of consumers.  If Toyota addresses the problems properly and assures consumers that they will redouble their commitment to quality and safety then the brand can easily be repaired and not suffer long-lasting brand equity erosion.

Will the Toyota brand recover?

My bet is that it will but only time, Toyota and consumers will ultimately make that determination.