Back in early 2006, Chevy tried to get on the whole “consumer generated content” bandwagon (or bandSUV, I suppose), with a website which allowed users to easily create their own “ads” for the Chevy Tahoe using provided video and music assets. In theory, the idea was to generate interest in the vehicle through user created ads circulating virally around the web. But just months ahead of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, with all things “green” and “climate crisis”-related just on the verge of tipping over from environmentalist niche to major mainstream movement, the cluelessness of the folks at Chevy about the extent of the negative sentiment for this vehicle became all too quickly apparent, as the most popular results generated by the their ad-creator came out looking something like this: .
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Three years after what remains one of the most infamous examples of a social media reality check, Chevy is pursuing perhaps the greatest rebranding of any American car company, (not that it has a choice, exactly), with the debut of the whopping 230mpg, electric vehicle: the Chevy Volt. .
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A phenomenal advancement from the environmental perspective, for sure, but from the marketing side, perhaps, it shouldn’t take a government bailout to get you to really listen to what consumers are telling you. .
As consumer spending and ad budgets continue to decrease, it’s not unreasonable to think we may be entering a “post consumption economy,” as Ed Cotton of Influx insights describes it:
This latest downturn, recession, depression, or whatever you like to call it has gotten people scared.
There’s simply no way to see ahead to work out when this is all going to be over and life and business will return to normal.
However, there’s certainly an expectation from most people that things will eventually return back to normality, with the only question being when this will happen?
What if their expectations are wrong?
What if we are going through a giant “RESET” and there will be no return to normal, just a new post-depression era.
There are some signals already that suggest this might be the case; the shift from negative saving for US consumers, to the current 5% of income, is a big change that might not be temporary. The fall off in credit and the push to saving means a lot less disposable income floating around the system and therefore a much more challenging time for brands trying to chase these dollars
While it’s definitely not business as usual in these times, before we get too far ahead of ourselves down the “post-consumption” rabbit hole, it’s useful to remember that the underlying socio-psychological desire we all have to express our identities has not in any way been dismantled recently. We may be spending less and saving more, but we nevertheless still seek ways to express aspects of our selves, and the things we purchase still serve to fulfill that desire. Of course, the way we make purchase decisions now is changing, and for brands, adapting to this more challenging consumer landscape requires a more attuned understanding of consumers’ needs, and more strategical approaches to connecting with them. To that end, here are five directions I think brands should focus their energies and resources towards in the current climate: .
In our latest research: Social Media Playtime is Over, we found that 53% of marketers are determined to increase their social media budget during a recession, and 42% will keep it the same, a total of 95% of marketers bullish on social media marketing. Why? The reasons are obvious to some, it’s inexpensive and the opportunity to benefit from cost-effective word-of-mouth, are promising.
The problem revealed in the research findings, however, according to Adage’s B.L. Ochman, is that many brands “Are not integrating social media into their overall marketing strategy. Instead, they are ‘experimenting’ with isolated tactics and hoping that they will take the place of long-term strategy. Furthermore, social media is [considered] more of an after-thought than a marketing line item.”
Since new media budgets have generally been small to begin with, (three-quarters of marketers surveyed have $100,000 or less budgeted for social media marketing), it’s not surprising they are easier to sustain, and even expand upon in this economy than a behemoth ad spend. But the big difference between the traditional advertising model and social media is that the latter does not really function as an isolated “campaign.” Social media strategy is an ongoing process that is integrated into the brand’s overall messaging and a defining aspect of its identity. In a time when consumers are becoming hyper-conscious of finances, all the advantages of social media (that are not offered by advertising) become more pronounced. If we now need to be much more discriminating about how we spend our money, personal endorsements (or denouncements) from real people (and particularly those in our social networks) will have much greater influence on our purchase decisions. So will the way a brand handles consumer engagement. Understanding social media as a strategy rather than a gimmick or “add-on” will go a long way to extending reach, impact, and customer retention in the recession. .
Last summer I spent weeks shopping for an anniversary present for my wife. I searched all my usual retail sources but couldn’t find anything that hit just the right note. Then I went to Etsy—an ecommerce site where artisans sell unique handmade goods—and found the microstore of ClockworkZero, a woman who turns old electronics gear into steampunk accessories. Presto: ClockworkZero’s stuff was both gorgeous and geeky, precisely the vibe I craved. I came away with a necklace made from a vintage vacuum tube.
The economy may be cratering, but people are stampeding to handmade goods. Why? The Etsy guys attribute their success in part to customers tiring of cookie-cutter products. “The ’90s were the period of wearing big-box names on your chest,” says Adam Brown, who heads up Etsy’s cooperative advertising program. The site’s popularity may also be a reaction to the slightly sour, rummage-sale feel that taints eBay, progenitor of the modern microbusiness.
As Virginia Postrel wrote in her superb book The Substance of Style, Americans have become more discriminating over the past few decades. In the ’60s and ’70s, we worried about getting good-quality stuff, she says, because mass-market manufacturing was often of such poor quality. But most products these days are decent: the bargain-basement TV you get at Best Buy will last 15 years. So now we’re focusing more on aesthetics, beauty, and uniqueness.
And we are also focusing on personal meaning. We don’t just want a beautiful and unique product, we want a personal story. NYU Sociologist Dalton Conley writes about the very importance of having a story to tell about the things we own (like the one Thompson recounted about his search for his wife’s present) in his book Elsewhere U.S.A.:
Individuals are led to try to give their totemic objects of choice a personalized spin, embodying them with particular knowledge or histories that bestow status on the owner. It might be the handbag fashioned by garbage pickers in Manila’s slums: The fashion statement rests both in the political stand, of sorts, taken by the owner and in the pleasure of telling how such a bag was obtained (especially if one cannot yet order them online). Or it might be the ability to talk about wine “intelligently.” Or maybe the simple wooden table that was serendipitously purchased at a roadside house sale when your rental car broke down in New Hampshire, that comes with a great story about the old lady who sold it to you while being pestered by a presidential candidate seeking her vote in the 1992 primary. Or the willingness of the Prius owner to boast about the greatest mileage per gallon she has ever achieved with her hybrid car that she hacked in order to be able to recharge the battery from a wall socket.
Often the social value rests in the aura around the product with which we imbue it.
If you’re thinking about brand development during the downturn that last sentence is gonna be crucial. “Consider the numbers,” Thompson writes. “Etsy has 2 million users buying nearly $90 million worth of stuff annually. Its sales have increased twentyfold in the past two years.” When all products are of equally good quality, and custom-made objects are both affordable and easily accessible, it’s the brands that can offer us the most meaningful and distinctive story that will provide the greatest “value,” and as we are forced to deliberate our purchases ever more stringently, they’ll be the ones we’ll choose to buy. .
3. SUPPORTING COMMUNITY
(This is also part and parcel of #1.)
When everything else is uncertain (and nothing says everything’s uncertain like putting the word “global” in front of the word “crisis”) the comfort of community will matter even more to us. More important that pushing consumers to connect to a brand, is creating ways for consumers to connect to each other through a brand. Working in lifestyle events and music festivals for 10 years, I’m intimately familiar with the incomparable role social gatherings play in reinforcing community ties. Many events can, themselves, become identity-defining brands, motivating attendance not just by the promise of a good time, but by the opportunity to share an experience with friends and establish belonging within a greater community. In talking with South By Southwest Festival organizer Hugh Forrest, Owyang writes that attendance to the event’s Interactive portion is up approximately 20% this year. It is a testament to the the appeal of community-reinforcing experiences that this can be the case in a recession.
MillerCoors is among the companies currently seeking to increase their investment in event strategy, according to Adage:
That stakes-raising strategy paid off two weeks ago, when MillerCoors sponsored a U2 Day for Emmis’ XRT radio station in Chicago to promote the release of U2’s new album, “No Line on the Horizon.” For the month leading up to the event, MillerCoors and Emmis ran a co-sponsored mobile campaign where listeners could send text messages to win a chance to score tickets to an exclusive U2-hosted event. Ms. Luegers said the promotion was the perfect opportunity to establish a database of avid MillerCoors drinkers in the Chicago market and re-market to those consumers in the future.
Plus, the U2 contest delivered the ultimate success metric for both advertiser and media partner: “Fans got the feeling of, ‘Wow, I’m in a secret underground society where the average person walking down the street doesn’t know about, but I’m here because I’m an avid listener,” she said.
For brands, providing environments that reinforce community ties means not only a much deeper connection with consumers, but also a platform to jump start the “network effect.” If everyone else in your community is into something, you’ll feel compelled to be into it too because it’s a part of the lifestyle that defines you. Think about how this impacted the spread of Twitter, American Apparel, or Harry Potter, for example. .Just as the brands that offer us personal meaning will be the ones considered to provide more bang for our buck, so too will the ones that offer us a deeper community connection and shared experiences. .
4. ADDRESSING CONSUMER REALITY
Same as we seek to counteract our anxiety in tough times with the buffer of community, we’ll gravitate to brands that offer “Certainty in Uncertain Times,” As Hjörtur Smárason writes on “Why Hyundai is Winning the US Automarket”:
It’s a recession and it isn’t easy for the car makers. In January sales dropped 37% in the US (which is pretty good compared to 88% here in Iceland). The American producers are leading the drop with 55% (Chrysler), 49% (GM) and 40% (Ford). But Hyundai didn’t drop. They increased their sales 14%!
Why is Hyundai growing while everyone else is losing? They are playing their cards according to the situation. These are uncertain times. People don’t know how the economy will develop. More people are going to lose their jobs, and no one is safe. At times like that, people hesitate to make big commitments, like buying a new car. So to overcome that, Hyundai started their Assurance program: If you lose your job or income, you can just return your car. They'[re] even offering to pay for you up to three months if you can find another job within that time.
Brands that are genuinely able to address the needs and prevailing sentiments of the current consumer reality may even be able to undermine brand loyalty as deeply embedded as the Mac Vs. PC dichotomy. Back in October, Steve Jobs announced that Apple doesn’t “Know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.” Which is why the nascent Netbook market is dominated by the PC. While the computer industry overall is going through a rather tough period, the Netbook segment of the market has shown a growth of over 160% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of growth, there’s no doubt loyal Mac users are being swept up in the Netbook tide. Whether it’s figuring out how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, or allaying people’s car-shopping fears, or just seeking to provide certainty in uncertain times in general, genuinely addressing the current consumer reality is going to be the deciding difference between growth and decline during the economic downturn.
Just a quick post to let you know our new Google overlords must have officially arrived, according to this ad:
Taking over from the exiting party which has heretofore been responsible for bestowing the bless-age, and to whom all unanswered questions had previously been directed, the new ephemeral, universal, entity that apparently has $5,000-a-month jobs for ye that ask to receive, will forthwith be G-ogle.
Also, the Singularity is here.
You’ll be getting an email.
The use of religious language (particularly next to the image), was perhaps deliberately intended to appeal to consumers for whom religious faith is a big, defining aspect of their identity, and for whom this kind of messaging could therefore make the ad specifically relevant. I don’t know what the statistics are on Christian stay-at-home moms, but I imagine the numbers would make this approach worthwhile.
(Ironically, if we’re gonna get biblical, the first Commandment is actually all about God insisting that there’s only one of him, and in case it wasn’t clear, Commandment #2 is basically, “and ye best not forget it.”)
Anyway… who’s got ideas for how we can rebrand Saturnalia…
I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.
The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.
In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (“How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”
“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:
While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”
“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”
Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.
“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:
I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.
Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”
A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”
Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?
Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”
In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)
As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”
As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.
And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)
“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?
In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)
Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.
Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?
The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.
Do you favor variety, novelty, diversity, new ideas, travel? Or do you prefer sticking to things that are familiar, safe, and dependable?
If you answered yes to the first question, then you are higher on a major personality trait called Openness To Experience (OTE). As psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in his TED talk, “If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of foods they like to eat.” Based on this trait you can also predict people’s political leanings. Robert McCrae, the main researcher of this trait, writes, “Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views, whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right wing views.” If you cross check this information with your answers to the questions at the top, no doubt you’ll find that this holds true for you.
I think it’s a popular perspective among the liberal folk to assume that people who vote for republicans are “blinded,” or “asleep” or something. If only they could just “wake up,” then they’d realize the errors of their ways. (Much like many conservatives think about liberals as well.) Haidt refers to this kind of thinking as a “moral matrix.” A kind of group-psychology framework that makes it hard for either side to really be able to understand why the people over there are making the decisions they are. According to Haidt, what it inevitably comes down to is morals.
Haidt has been studying morality from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, investigating common denominators in what cultures all across the world value as right and wrong in order to uncomver what may be the innate moral predispositions “built in” to the the human exeprience. Thus, his definition of morality is “Any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.” According to his research, there are five distinct moral predispositions, which Haidt calls the Foundations of Morality:
1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.
3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
Haidt’s analogy for how these five foundations work to create our personal moral frameworks is that of an audio equalizer. Each foundation is like a kind of “channel” that we can adjust to our own personal levels, according to how meaningful each one is for us. Both liberals and conservatives agree that the first two foundations are critical components of morality, and they set those channels way up high, with liberals tending to set them a little bit higher than conservatives. However, the big divergence point where liberal and conservative viewpoints drastically split apart is on the last three moral channels. Namely, conservatives value Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity as significant foundations of morality, bringing the levels up, and liberals view these three aspects as having nothing to do with morality, and bring them way down.
This phenomenon, by the way, is not specific just to the U.S. It applies to liberals and conservatives in regions that Haidt and his team studied all across the world, Canada, The UK, Australia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia–this split is not a national phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon. “Liberals,” as Haidt says, “Speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice even at the risk of chaos. If you’re high on openness to experience, revolution is good, it’s change, it’s fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious. And it’s really easy to lose.”
The reality here, then, is that people who vote for republicans are not “asleep” or “unconscious,” and can potentially be “woken up,” or something, as liberals are fond of saying, but that they actually have a totally different sense of morality, and vision of society. In both metaphoric and demographic terms, liberals and conservatives want to listen to different music. Which poses a bit of a problem. Since they can only elect one DJ at a time.
“It’s a striking fact of modern American life that rural white conservatives have become smarter, better organized and more militant, and that they now largely vote as a bloc. But the notion that there is some sort of equivalent or larger political grouping that opposes them in some coherent way is pure fiction. (See also: Democratic Party, recent history of.) Mann’s supposed metro majority simply does not exist — it’s a welter of races, social classes and economic strata, from the urban poor to the bicoastal intelligentsia to the security-obsessed suburban moms of demographic lore. Being non-rural, non-born-again and non-right-wing does not constitute an identity.”
This lack of a “unified liberal identity”–a concept that’s practically an oxymoron–has left them at a disadvantage, which has been expertly exploited by the united conservative front in recent years. As O’Heir writes, “These days, [conservatives] will support, with impressive solidarity, political leaders and public figures who share their backgrounds and their values, and whom they trust to reverse, or at least slow down, the pace of social change.”
Which makes me wonder–considering what Haidt and McCrae’s findings have revealed about the common affinity for change that liberal, Open-To-Experience personality types possess, perhaps Change itself is the one constant that could finally unite all their disparate identities.
