How everyone except Government Motors sees the Chevy Volt

Imagine you’re Joel Ewanick, GM’s global marketing chief, and you’ve got a problem.

You have a subcompact car that, even with a $7,500 government subsidy, sells for the price of a luxury sedan.

It has severly limited range. According to your own company’s director of electric vehicles and batteries, it would take four weeks to drive this subcompact from Detroit to Florida. Which, he admits, is one whole week longer than it would’ve taken to make the trip by bike.

Its sales target for last year was less than 1% of your best selling model’s, but it missed even that unambitious goal by 24%.

Your dealerships from New York to California are refusing deliveries.

Oh, and the car’s best known for catching fire.

So what do you do?

Anything but what Government Motors is doing to try to sell its Chevy Volts this year.

Denial

GM is launching a new ad campaign, comprising a new :30 television spot and print advertising in the form of a big-space open letter from CEO Dan Akerson.

Among other claims, he calls the Volt “a technological ‘moon shot.’” Well, maybe, in that both are the products of massive government subsidy and influence. But in terms of performance on the road and in the marketplace, the moon shot it most resembles is Apollo 13 (which, you may recall, didn’t get there and nearly killed its crew).

Perfectly safe, perfectly safe, perfectly safe…

From Akerson on down, GM management is claiming that all those pesky news stories about fires breaking out in Volts are, you shoulod pardon the expression, smoke. That being the case, why did they:

• Offer to buy back Volts?
• Offer free loaners?
• Modify their battery packs?
• Add a dashboard light to warn drivers when batteries start to overheat?

Education = desperation

The open-letter advertising is an attempt to educate all those ignorant consumers out there to believe Government Motors instead of their own lying eyes. Like most “educational” advertising, it won’t work. Consumer perceptions are realities that advertisers have to live with, not beat their heads against the wall trying to change.

Plagiarizing Chrysler

When the new Volt commercial debuts on Fox News and spreads to other networks, it may sound kinda familiar. Because by the strangest coincidence, it bears an uncanny resemblance (except in length) to last year’s two-minute Chrysler Super Bowl spot.

Chrysler used Eminem as voice-over, Volt uses Tim Allen. Chrysler showed one of their cars driving around what’s left of downtown Detroit, while the Chevy spot shows an assembly line of partially assembled Volts moving through Hamtramck, a small city surrounded by Detroit.

Like Chrysler, Volt treats coming from the dysfunctional, bankrupt, imploding “heart of Detroit” as some kind of huge consumer benefit. And, like Chrysler, it doesn’t say much about the product itself — only that it’s “extended-range” (Detroit to Florida in 28 days?) and “electric.”

The commercial does have one moment of unwitting candor when the voice-over says, “This is the car America had to build.” Sure, with the Obama administration holding a figurative gun to GM’s head during the 2009 Chapter 11 bailout.

False hopes?

Chevy spokesman Rob Peterson told Advertising Age, “We expect to see sales pick up.” But since a significant (but undisclosed) portion of last year’s 7,671 Volts sold (vs. a 10,000-car target) were to government fleets, and since neither cities nor the feds buy new fleets every year, it’s hard to see where that pickup will come from.

It’s even harder to see how this meretricious and imitative campaign will help.

If the Richmond metro area’s share of Volts bought equals its share of the U.S. Population (0.4%), that means that some 30.4 of the “cars America had to build” are buzzing up and down Broad Street, Midlothian Turnpike, the Powhite and I-64. In the year ahead, don’t expect to see lots more of them.

Running out the clock?

Advertisers are going all-out with a startlingly innovative new game plan this year. They’re going long. With their commercials, that is.

Volkswagen will be airing a 60-second spot. So will their sister brand, Audi. Hyundai’s running a :60 just before the kickoff, on the assumption that that’s when they’ll have more of viewers’ undivided attention. (Of course, the fact that they’ll be paying only $200,000 to $4 million just before the game instead of around $6+ million during it may have had something to do with it.)

And a 45-second PepsiMax commercial is rumored to be in production.

Isolated phenomenon or trend?

Kantar Media, which tracks television ad buys, notes that November, 2011 — the most recent month for which they’ve compiled statistics — saw an increase in 60-second commercial buys and a corresponding decrease in :30s.

But Super Bowl ad plans and buys are made months before then. So what gives? Why are advertisers coughing up twice as much as the $3.5-million-per-30-seconds rate? To say nothing of hundreds of thousands more in production costs? Especially since, the mini-trend that Kantar’s statistics imply notwithstanding, :60s will have limited usefulness the rest of the year.

Suddenly, it’s 1972

The last time :60s dominated the airwaves was in the early 1970s, and that was for dollar-and-cents reasons, not for effectiveness.

Research from the time showed that consumers could absorb an average of 2.5 ideas from a 60-second commercial, 1.25 from a :30. That hasn’t changed over the past 40 years. But the television rate structure has.

Through the early ’70s, advertiser paid a premium for buying :30s. Air time for 30-second spot was 50% of the length of a :60, but cost 75% as much to buy. Then, the rate structure changed, that 25% premium went away, and :30s started to dominate the airwaves. Until, possibly, the near future.

The story:

According to Seth Winter, NBC’s executive in charge of sports advertising sales, the 60-second buys let advertisers make “the art form of storytelling take on a greater role in the Super Bowl.”

Others in the industry seem to be adopting the same party line.

“Humans prefer storytelling to just telling,” says Dave Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America.

Jim Haygood, who edited last year’s 30-second “Darth Vader” Volkswagen Super Bowl spot, told Advertising Age that they also produced a :60 version, and that “everyone was in love with the 60, so we struggled to get the 30…[W]e all feel that the 30 didn’t quite capture the full feeling of the 60.”

Scott Keogh, Audi of America’s chief marketing officer, believes that people need more substance to choose high-ticket products like cars, that “aren’t viewed as trivial.”

But that’s just the excuse. Do you really need all of 60 seconds to tell consumers that Volkswagens have remote starting?

The Reason:

It’s yet another case of a disease that advertising asgencies are particularly susceptible to — the Bright Shiny Object Syndrome.

The Bright Shiny Object in question was last year’s two-minute (120-second) commercial in which Eminem told 111 million American viewers that they should buy Chrysler cars because they came from the bankrupt, dysfunctional, imploding city of Detroit. (I don’t know about storytelling, but that’s some story. And I’m sure Scott Keogh was impressed with all the substance.)

It’s not the length, but how you use it

There’s no immediate danger that local Richmond television advertisers are going to start buying minutes, so we’re all safe from twice as much exposure to Joel Bieber and his fellow personal injury lawyers at one sitting. But the key to effective television commercials is not length, but balance.

On the one hand, your commercials need to have entertainment value. You’re asking consumers to give you a small piece of their lives, so you need to make it worth their while.

On the other hand, that enterntainment value needs to be related to the one most important thing your product will do for your audience.

Too much product, and you’ll have your them running for a beer in the fridge. Too much entertainment, and you’ll be using a kid in a Darth Vader costume to tell consumers they should buy a $16,645 car for the sole reason that it has remote starting.

At least somebody got it right.

Quick Response [QR] codes — those bar-code-like things you see on everything from rental cars to Bratz dolls, should be a marketer’s dream.

Since the early days of direct-order coupon ads in the early 20th Century, advertisers have known that the simpler the response mechanism, the higher the response — and what can be simpler than pointing your smart phone, scanning and clicking?

QR codes make every advertising medium instant direct-response — everything from the Times Dispatch to the packaging at Wal-Mart, Martin’s or Kroger to the billboards along I-64.

Enterprise Rent A Car pastes QR codes on the left front windows and attaches them to the keyrings of 1 million North American rental vehicles so that passers-by and drivers who are so inclined can get information from the  car’s manufacturer. JC Penney has gone hog-wild with QR codes, including holiday gift tags that let the recipient hear a recorded message from the giver. Some funeral homes even sell tombstones with QR codes that link to an obituary of the dearly departed.

QR codes connect target audiences with the instant gratification of a sales message, video, or e-commerce portal. This means that retailers can increase productivity by serving more customers with fewer salespeople.

Best of all, they’re precisely measurable, and if there’s one thing marketers love, it’s metrics.

So what’s not to like?

Maybe the fact that consumers don’t use them.

Largely ignored

According to Forrester Research, 95% of Americans who own smartphones did not use QR codes throughout the three months ending July, 2011. And the 5% who did aren’t exactly your prime consumer target audience. They’re affluent, but also young and male.

There are several reasons for QR codes’ massive non-use — some having to do with technical limitations and some resulting from what can only be described as dumb advertiser mistakes.

Due to technical difficulties…

The first of these technical limitations is that different kinds of QR codes require different applications for scanning them, and not everybody has the one for yours.

The second is that too many of the people who have the right apps just don’t know how to use them.

But the biggest problems are those that advertisers create themselves.

Shooting your QR code in the foot

For example, QR codes need to be surrounded by a certain minimum amount of white space in order to be scannable. Some advertisers don’t leave that border, in the interests of esthetics. Others make them too small, so they won’t fight the graphics of the advertising or packaging they’re part of, and in the process render them unscannable.

Still others unthinkingly put their QR codes in places where there’s no Internet connectivity.

United Airlines, for example, very cleverly put QR codes in their in-flight magazines, forgetting that once the jetway door closes, all cell phones and interactive devices have to be turned off. Virgin, which offers in-flight wifi, could get away with that, but then Virgin isn’t United.

It’s not a problem in Richmond, where all mass transit is above ground, but Channel 11, the local Fox affiliate, and Red Bull put QR codes on New York subway posters where, again, there’s no connectivity.

In Seattle, Miller Coors placed QR codes in bars and restaurants on New Year’s Eve so that patrons who’d overindulged could click for taxis. It never occurred to them that anyone too drunk to drive is also probably too drunk to aim a smartphone well enough for a clear scan.

Yet another unforced error that marketers make is directing those few consumers who do click to a full-blown website instead of a mobile one. As a result, it takes forever  — or at least longer than most concumers are willing to wait for — to load. And if your site has Flash and your consumer has a iPhone, it won’t run at all.

Avoid the “And then what?” effect

When consumers do scan and follow the QR link, the result is all too often a big letdown. Going to all that trouble to get useless boilerplate or the advertiser’s regular home page makes consumers feel cheated — too cheated to ever try again.

If you’re using QR codes, it’s essential to give your customer something well worth his or her while for taking the effort.

In the UK, the Radisson Edwardian hiotel chain puts QR codes on its restaurant menus. These let diners see what a dish they’re considering looks like and how it’s made before they choose it — and does so far more quickly, accurately and consistency than human waiters do.

At the Denver airport, FirstBank, which bases its advertising campaign on being helpful, has posters with QR codes that let fliers with smart phones or tablets download puzzles and public-domain books to make the waiting time go faster.

MogoTix software uses QR codes to send virtual boarding passes to airline passengers, saving paper, frustration and time.

And with PYOW! software on Mailchimp.com, local Richmond retailers can build traffic by sending QR codes with personalized, time-sensitive coupons or sale notices to past or prospective customers.

Scans don’t always equal sales

Even when QR codes are genuinely helpful to consumers, they may not do much for your bottom line.

Last year, Home Depot put QR codes on spring plants so that customers could learn which go best together. They continued the QR test with Chritmas lights and artificial trees. But according to a spokesman, response has been slow.

Macy’s sent out QR codes linking to videos from clothing designers. The store chain reports positive customer feedback and response above expectations (though not what those expectations were in the first place) — but it took a national television campaign promoting the QR cards to do it.

But advertisers still love them

Consumers may not be using QR codes, but marketers still are. Even though the response is so low. Even though responses don’t necessarily lead to sales.

It’s “another instance of shiny-object syndrome,” says Melissa Parrish of Forrester Research. “Something becomes trendy or sexy, and marketers feel they have to jump on board to position themselves as innovative and make sure they don’t fall behind.”

Maybe they can afford to waste money on QR codes that don’t work, but you can’t. So think before you use them — about how and where you’ll display them, to whom, and what’s in it for them if they follow through. That way, your love affair with QR codes won’t be unrequited.

Their commercials promised more than they could deliver.

You’ve seen it on Channel 6, Channel 8, Channel 12, Channel 35 and the Verizon and Comcast cable systems serving Richmond. Consumers saw it on their local TV channels across the country. It was a Best Buy television advertising campaign claiming that between the retail chain’s huge inventory, their online ordering and fast shipping, “Santa better watch his back this year.”

Well, this year, seeing wasn’t believing.

Aggressive online discounting against Amazon and Walmart Stores boosted website traffic, in-store sales and general demand — demand it turns out Best Buy couldn’t satisfy. The Minnesota retailer made news with a last-minute cancelation of orders dating as far back as the Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving.

And when word of the cancelations leaked out — the company having disclosed them only to select media and never even mentioning them on Facebook and Twitter — they also made enemies.

Outraged customers have filled the Best Buy website with vehement complaints.

“I’ll sure think twice before ordering from you for #Christmas next #blackfriday 2012,” one tweeted on December 23.

Another complained that after having received an e-mail that her purchase was en route to her local Best Buy, another told her on the delivery date that it “suddenly ‘was delayed in shipping from warehouse to store.’ My beef is that the first email must have been a lie — the item was obviously never put in transit.”

Yet another posted of receiving a free bundled controller with a PlayStation order, getting it independently, then being told the main item was backordered, then being charged for the free item. “Bestbuy.com really handled this transaction poorly,” the post said.

Orthers weren’t so understated. One post was titled, “I’d like to thank Best Buy for killing my Christmas.” Many called Best Buy a Grinch, and at least one tweet, citing a Gizmodo post, accused Best Buy of “screwing” consumers.

And still others advised disappointed shoppers which competitors they could order from instead.

Best Buy is coming off a third quarter in which net income declined 29%, in a year that saw company stocks lose 32% of their value. The fourth quarter, and the first quarter of next year, may make that look like the Good Old Days. “[T]he bad press is enough to scare some people away from ordering online at Best Buy in the future,” wrote one Los Angeles security analyst.

So the next time you plan a big sale, promotion or ad campaign, remember what Best Buy obviously didn’t: Never promise what you can’t deliver.

The strength is that anyone can do it.

The weakness is that anyone does, regardless of whether they know the least bit about marketing. And when they do, the results are often disastrous, as Advertising Age‘s just-released list of the year’s biggest social-media marketing blunders demonstrates:

Anthony Weiner: Maybe he shouldn’t be on this list. His tweets were not about marketing, but packaging.

Chrysler: The auto maker rolls out a new national campaign, “Imported from Detroit,” on the Super Bowl. Then some low-level jerk at New Media Strategies, Chrysler’s online agency, tweets — not on his personal acount, but on @ChryslerAutos — “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f***ing drive.” (We won’t spell out the f-word gerund here, but he did in his tweet.) Result: agency fires employee, Chrysler fires agency.

Kenneth Cole: Reacts to February’s Tahrir Square uprising by tweeting, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is available online.” How do you say “putting your shoe in your mouth” in Arabic?

AFLAC: Spokesduck voice Gilbert Gottfried posts tsunami jokes on his Twitter account. The Japanese are not amused. Neither is AFLAC, 75% of whose 2010 revenues cam from Japan. Gottfried’s voice-over gig becomes a dead duck.

Netflix: In September, the company announces a plan gto split off DVD rentals as a separate, extra-cost service called Qwikster. It turns out they can’t get a Twitter acount for it because the guy who already owns @Qwikster doesn’t want to sell it. But that’s the least of their problems, as 800,000 subscribers cut back or entirely quit their Netflix service by the time the company kills Qwikster three weeks later.

QANTAS: After a bitter October labor dispute that grounded its entire fleet and stranded passengers worldwide, the Australian airline launches a November “describe your dream luxury in-flight experience” online promotion. #QantasLuxury gets thousand of tweets, of which, “Planes that arrive intact and on time” was one of the most pleasant.

GoDaddy: America’s biggest web host has never exactly been plagued with an excess of good taste, but CEO Bob Parsons went too far, even for them, when he tweeted links to video of him shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe. PETA organized a boycott, and competitiors jumped on the bandwagon, offering discount rates and donations to elephant charities to site owners to switch.

Miami Heat: Ignoring a specific NBA ban on public comment on the lockout, owner Micky Arison retweets lockout-related posts and gets into online arguments with followers. In November, the NBA fines him $500,000.

Ragu: First they create an online video campaign in which wives talk about how clueless rtheir husbands are in the kitchen. Then, to generate buzz, they send it to prominent dad bloggers on Twitter. They get buzz, all right, but not the kind they wanted. There’s a backlash of posts by prominent dad bloggers about the brand being anti-fatherhood.

Ashton Kutscher: Not knowing that the Penn State scandal involved child abuse, the actor takes to his @aplusk account to tweet 8.5 million followers, “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #no class as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste.” After a firestorm of response, Kutscher apologizes online and says he’s turning over management of his Twitter account to his professional PR team.

In 2012, don’t wait to be burned before you follow that example.

Consumerist picked the categories, which narrowed down the choices considerably. Maybe they had to, in view of Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of everything is crud. Arguably, 90% of all the year’s television commercials may be too much to narrow down, much less be subjected to. But Consumer Reports does have a different perspective from the everyday, run-of-the-mill consumers; ya think maybe a publication that refuses to take advertising somehow doesn’t like ads?

Okay, we’ve built up enough suspense.

And now, the losers!

Most Grating Performance by a Human: It takes a lot of obnoxiousness to beat out Progressive Insurance’s Flo, but AT&T did it, by a 2% margin of the votes. The human in question is the  flash mob dancer who shows up at the wrong time and starts doing his stuff in the middle of Grand Central Station, because his mobile network took too long to send him a schedule update.

Group That Ought to Go Its Separate Ways: The Esurance office staff, who are too busy with lame banter to get any work done. Downsizing, anyone? Their 32% vote beat out the Trojan Triphora ladies’ 27% and the Miller Lite “Man Up” guys’ 26%.

Most Irritating Animated Actor: The Car Fax Car Fox, who edged out AFLAC’s rapping “major medical” pigeon by a mere 3%. Guess that’s what happens when you fire Gilbert Gottfried.

Worst Abuse of an Existing Song: Swiffer’s version of “What About Love” wiped out the competition with a whopping 42.56% of the votes.

Original Jingle That Should Be Junked: Arby’s “Good Mood Food,” which neither rhymes nor makes sense, got twice as many votes as Education Connection, the second-place contender.

Creepiest Commercial of the Year: What with Target’s denim-fetishist music teacher, Arby’s unappetizing “Frog Tongue” and JellO’s Pudding Face, there was tough competition, but the Pos-T-Vac penis vacuum rose to the occasion.

Celebrity Who Could Probably Use a New Manager: When you’re as far past your shelf life as most of the celebrities who do these commercials, you’ll take whichever manager is willing to take you. The unlikely Rent a Center tag team of Hulk Hogan and Troy Aikman overcame Montel Williams (remember him?) for Money Mutual and Jamie Lee Curtis (remember her?) for Activia to win the title. Of course, two against one isn’t exactly fair, especially when one of the opponents is a girl.

Trend That Needs to Stop Being a Trend: In a race close enough to be within the margin of statistical error, Men Barely Tolerating Their Wives and Girlfriends (e.g., the guy who willingly subjects himself to listening to his wife’s babble in order to get a Klondike Bar) noses out Surprising Real People (e.g., Ford ambushing a real owner with a “press conference”) and Old Spice Copycats including Edge Shave Gel and Dairy Queen.

And the grand loser is…

Absolute Worst Ad in America: Decisions, decisions, decisions! There was Summer’s Eve’s Hail to the V, as in …well, you know what. There was Geico’s spot about using smart phones to do dumb things; this was a surprising contender from Richmond’s Martin Agency, whose commercials almost never end up in worst-advertising contests. There was AT&T’s screaming spider who’s too dumb to tell the difference between a real spider an a photo of one on a smartphone screen. And there’s another AT&T spot, in counterpoint to the winning trend that needs to stop being one, has a shrewish wife berating her husband for getting unlimited texting, which, the script reveals, just happens to be cheaper. But after  115,000 votes, the decisive choice for Absolute Worst is (cue the drum roll) Luvs Diapers’ “Poop, There It Is!” in which there’s an animated American Idol-like contest for which baby can fill his or her disposable diaper with the most, you guessed it, poop by weight. Not recommended for mealtime viewing.

There you have it, folks, the worst tv commercials of the year.

Oh, well. There’s always next year.

Who needs it?

Bad news for all the car dealerships along West Broad Street and Midlothian Turnpike (and their counterparts across the U.S.A.): Your manufacturers’ ad departments are letting you down — to say nothing of boring the pants off your potential customers.

Formulas for a fantasy world

According to research just released by Ace Metrix, all those commercials featuring cars with oversize ribbon bows being given as gifts or end-of-year sales just aren’t working. In the consumer research company’s scale of zero to 950 points, rating for relevance, persuasion and watchability, most makes’ spots — particularly most luxury makes’ — are falling below the norm for fourth quarter 2011.

That’s because they’re irrelevant and unpersuasive in anything resembling the real world, while their trite, overused formulas make them unwatchable.

“[T]his is certainly the time of the year when a veritable caravan of auto ads rolls across the video desert bearing gifts in the form of year-end deals, incentives, promotions, close-outs, mistletoe and a dab of frankincense for good measure,” Ace Metrix notes, but for more than 150 new commercials, “reception from U.S. consumers this quarter to those car-as-gift pitches suggests automakers are way off base.”

“[I]t’s astounding that four of the ‘Top 10′ luxury automotive ads were below norm,” says Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll.

Lincoln, Infiniti and Jaguar are all below norms this quarter, while Lexus’ give-an-expensive-car-for-the-holidays “December to Remember” campaign dropped a full 14% compared to last year. Adding injury to insult is the fact that as a high-interest category, car commercials in general and luxury-car commercials in particular usually score well above the advertising norms.

Earth to carmakers…

This, says Daboll, is “a clear signal that many automotive brands have stepped away from good creative this season and fallen back on ‘Buy it now, you idiot’ messaging wrapped up in sales events and bows.”

And the “idiots” aren’t having any of it. Among consumer verbatims:

• “It’s the Christmas car bow ad…I think advertisers should know we’re tired of these…”
• How many times are car companies going to show a car as a Christmas gift?…It makes me NOT want to buy [from them].”
• “People don’t buy other people cars, and even if they did, do you think hearing one annoying jingle would really clue them in to the fact they were getting a new car? No!”

…face a few simple facts

Carmakers need to leave their Bizarro world and reconnect with a few basic facts of life and advertising, which apply as strongly to local Richmond advertisers as to Jaguar, Infiniti and Lexus:

• Consumers don’t do what you want them to do just because you tell them to. They have minds of their own and base purchase decisions on their own wants and needs. If you can persuade them that your product fullfills those needs, great. But if not, all the sales and bows in the world won’t help.
• People make buying decisions emotionally. They buy with their hearts first, then use their heads to marshal facts and rational support to justify their emotional decisions. Snow scenes, holiday music, bows on cars and other overused devices don’t generate emotion — other than revulsion and boredom.
• People don’t give expensive cars as gifts. Even in the best of times, few did. And in a seemingly endless, three-year-long recession that has consumers despairing over the country’s future, they’re certainly not about to.

Consumers who have high five-figure sums to spend on cars aren’t dummies. Advertisers need to respect their intelligence, their context and their timing.

Out with the white, in with the red!

In Martin’s, Food Lion, Wal-Mart, Kroger and other supermarket chains, throughout the Richmond metro area and the nation, Coca-Cola cans are changing back from white to their traditional red. All because of a failed green promotion.

Green Promotion

It all started when Coca-Cola partnered with the World Wildlife Fund in what seemed like a good idea at the time: Coke would urge customers to contribute a dollar to the WWF’s save-the-polar-bears campaign and match donations to a $3 million maximum.

Perception vs. Reality

But reports of the polar bears’ impending doom may be slightly exaggerated.

According to a 2008 US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report:

The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 US Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear population “may now be at historic highs.”

And, photos of polar bears dying of exhaustion from swimming notwithstanding, a 2008 audit from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, the Monash Univeristy (Australia) department of Business and Economic Forecasting and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reported that “none of the reports [of threats to polar bear survival as a species] referred to sources of scientific forecasting methodology.”

But those are facts. WWF and its allies have effectively created perceptions that differ from them, and Coke can’t be faulted for going along with popular perceptions.

In marketing, perceptions are facts, and advertisers who waste time and effort trying to change them as part of generally educating the public do so at their peril.

White cans

To build awareness for this promotion, for the first time in its 125-year history, Coca-Cola came out with white cans (showing polar bears). They started cranking out a four-month supply — enough to last from December through March, some 1.4 billion cans in all. “We’re turning our cans white because turning our backs wasn’t an option,” went the white-can campaign’s slogan.

Coke wanted a “disruptive”campaign, said company spokesman Scott Williamson, adding that “The can has…generated a lot of interest and excitement.”

Maybe.

But the disruption, interest and excitement weren’t exactly the kind Coke had in mind.

Consumers seeing red

Internet comments have accused Coke of “trickery” and victimization. Consumers posted comments on the company’s official  blog, telling them that their business was soda, not climate change.  Others made angry phone calls. Tweets have called the white cans “blasphemy.” Others have warned that mixing up Coke and Diet Coke “is a SHOCK to the palate!”

An Atlanta deli owner reported customers returning opened white cans after realizing they weren’t drinking Diet Coke. (He had to eat the cost of the Diet Cokes he exchanged them for).

Diabetic customers complained that the white cans (see photo) looked too much like the silver Diet Coke cans, causing them to drink the sugar-packed version by mistake.

When Wisconsin 4-H delegates were flying home from a national congress, they were served regular Coke in white cans instead of the Diet Cokes they requested. “The flight attendants were really frustrated,” one of the delegates commented.

Consumers have posted YouTube videos complaining about the white cans. One features a blindfolded taste test; after sipping from a red can and a white can, a blindfolded woman pronounces the white-can Coke “the funky one!” (even though the Coke inside both was the same).

In all, there’s been so much consumer pushback that Coke is phasing in its red Christmas cans early and packaging its January and February soda in red cans. (They haven’t said what they’ll do with the 350 million white cans planned for those months.)

There are lessons for advertisers in Coke’s failure.

Learn from Coke’s mistakes

1. Never forget what business you’re in. Coca-Cola is in the soda business, not the environmental or climate change or polar bear business. Maybe Coke can afford to blow $3 million in matching donations, plus the cost of 350,000 cans, plus loss of goodwill, plus the costs of creating a website page detailing the differences between the white and Diet Coke cans ) presumably to print out and take with you to the suoermarket), plus the costs of (mis)conceiving and executing this campaign in the first place. But few, if any, local Richmnnd advertisers can.
2. Never forget why consumers buy your product. People don’t buy sodas to save the polar bears or stop climate change or even to support the World Wildlife Fund. They buy Cokes because they’re thirsty and want something sweet, carbonated and caffeinated to drink. Especially in this three-year-and-counting recession, marketing charity begins at home.
3. You can’t afford to educate the world, so don’t try. Here‘s why.
4. Don’t spit in the soup. Make sure that whatever new product or package or promotion you roll out doesn’t cannibalize sales of your existing ones.
5. Packaging affects product perception. Even though the Coke formula is the same for all its packaging, consumers perceived taste differences from one can to another. This should not have come as a surprise to Coke. In the 1950s, when introducing Tide, Procter & Gamble tested different color packaging (of the same exact detergent) on housewives. One color made them feel the detergent was so strong it was damaging their clothes. Another made them think it was too weak to get the dirt out. P&G went with the color that testing showed was just right and haven’t had cause to change it in half a century. Which brings us to our last lesson.
6. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If your advertising and marketing are working just fine, be careful before you augment or change them. That doesn’t mean you should never consider improvements. You should, because nothing works forever. But before you roll out a new and improved campaign, promotion or package, check it out thoroughly with your consumers before taking it to market. Don’t release an improvement until you’re sure it really is one.

Like a loaded gun in the hands of a three-year-old

More and advertisers — from local Richmond ambulance-chasing personal-injury lawyers to worldwide brands– have succumbed to the dogma that all it takes to win big-time in the marketplace is a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. Back in March, we highlighted two national examples of how misguided this belief can be — the 2010 Pepsi social media campaign that rocketed their brand all the way from second in its category to third, and the Burgeer King social media campaign that produced a 2/5% sales decline while McDonald’s sales grew 4.4%.

Pepsi and BK were lucky. They just lost sales. A social media campaign made international headlines this week because it cost the advertiser not only sales, but also its reputation.

Watch what you say

The first reason for this and similar debacles was the advertisers didn’t realize that the audience they were reaching was, basically, everybody. “[W]ith every person on the planet who has an Internet connection now armed with the power to freely publish information one to many across sites on the web,” writes Emma Barnett in the (UK) Telegraph,“…companies have never been more held to ransom by the customers.”

QUANTAS airlines learned this the expensive way.

Coming off a bitter lockout and a string of safety failures that grounded their whole fleet and stranded passengers around the world, the Australian international carrier decided that what they needed was a Twitter promotion asking consumers to tweet back their idea of a “dream luxury flight experience” using the hashtag QuantasLuxury.

It wasn’t.

The first tweeted response, from one Axel Bruns, said his dream luxury experience would be, “Planes that arrive intact and on time…” It went downhill from there. Stephen Dann said his QANTAS luxury experience would be “Flights that leave on schedule because Management doesn’t arbitrarily shut down the airlne.”

And when you say it

Jeremy Sear tweeded a “Quick note to corporate Australia: when you’re in the middle of crushing your workforce, don’t start a Twitter promotion.”

That’s simple common sense. But when you consider who’s actually doing the Twitter promotions and how blinkered their mindsets, you’ll see that common sense is all too uncommon. As kiwi_kali tweeted, “Somewhere in Quantas HQ a middle manager is yelling at a Gen Y social media ‘expert’ to make it all stop. LOL”

And that’s the root of the problem

Don’t leave it to “experts”

Especially in small markets like Richmond, many advertisers too small to have in-house advertising or marketing departments turn to vendors who claim expert technical knowledge of the software and the Internet. “It’s too true that often company executives, desperate to show that they have a digital strategy, think that forgoing spending money on [an] actual properly planned disigital advertising campaign, and instead opting for free and poorly thought-out staff plugs on Twitter, is the way forward,” Barnett cautions. As a result, she adds, “it is frequently the case that the people in charge of ‘social media’…are also very young and inexperienced at traditional marketing — because all things digital are perceived as a young person’s area.”

This perception proved costly to Habitat, the British furniture retail chain.

The high cost of tunnel vision

In 2009, when the Green Revolution in Iran was still going strong. some social media “expert” at Habitat checked out the top ten trending topics and midnlessly decided to paste the top hashtags — including “Iran” and “Mousavi” — into promotional tweets.

Never mind that events of far more geoploitical significance than furniture sales were taking place. Never mind that people in Iran and worldwide were using social networking to share information and eyewitness accounts. link to news reports and coordinmate protests against the recent rigged election results. They’re top topics, so let’s use them.

And use them they did, pasting them into hashtags without even knowing what the hashtags referred to, with tweets like: HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a gift card.

The backlash was almost as violent as Ahmadinejad’s crackdown, causing Habitat to post that “We were totally shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence [sic] that has been caused.”

Alex Burmaster, Nielsen Online communications director, pointed out the one basic truth that Habitat’s social media “experts,” focused like a laser on top rankings instead of the outside world, failed to grasp. “Advertising in social media can be like gatecrashing a party,” he noted. “People who use social media are much less tolerant to have their conversations interrupted by advertisers.”

This suggests that you’d do better trusting your social media marketing to people with a knowledge base dating back to the early days of commercial radio of ways to interrupt people’s media use without alienating them.

Social media marketing is marketing

“Social media has often not been the best way for companies to communicate their brand message,” Barnett says with typical Brituish understatment. “It is good  for responding to customers, but any marketing, even on social sites, needs the same level of thouight, crisis management and craftsmanship as a traditional advertising campaign. [emphasis added]”

It makes sense to let social media “experts” do the button-pushing and other back-end stuff for your campaign. But unless you’re suicidal, it makes absolutely no sense to put them in charge of your marketing strategy and content.

For that, you should trust the marketuing experts instead of the “experts.”

Only a few shopping hours left till Christmas!

Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner early this year. Or, better yet, turn it into a picnic as you camp out on line at Macy’s, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, HHGregg, Kohl’s, or the Richmond big-box retailer of your choice. Black Friday’s going to be a little early this year.

From Black Friday to Black Midnight

In case you didn’t know it from all the advertising activity — the spam, the coupon ads and direct mail, the JCPenney “plan your attack” previews, the return of Target’s obnoxious holiday shopping spokeswoman to television – retailers are trying to grab as many of your gift dollars as early as possible.

To that end, opening times, usually scheduled around sunrise, have now moved to zero-dark-hundred, with many being as early as midnight.

And you’re going to be seeing even more of the Target shopping lady because they’ve doubled Friday, making it two days long.

Apparently, it pays to advertise

According to the NPD group, consumers are responding. They project that 17% of consumers plan to start their Christmas shopping, up from 12% last year. Some 74 million say they’ll definitely be shopping, while another 77 million say they’ll wait to see if the bargains are good enough to justify battling the crowds. And crowds there will be.

The National Retail Federation predicts that as many as 152 million people will be gift-shopping Thanksgiving weekend (up from 138 million last year) — and it’ll feel like they’ve all converged on Short Pump, Stony Point, Midlothian Turnpike, Willow Lawn and other shopping meccas throughout the Richmond metro area.

Strategic schizophrenia

Marketers seem to be of two minds about their strategies. While their couponing and advertising scream “Price!” they think they’ll capture market share through value, which is not quite the same thing.

“A high percentage of people are planning to take advantage of sales, coupons and direct-mail offers,” says Ted Marzilli, senior vice president-global managing director at YouGov’s BrandIndex unit.

That’s price.

But “value is important and particularly important in the economy we’ve been in for the last two or three years,” he adds.

A YouGov BrandIndex survey shows how conflated these two conflicting attributes have become. The eight brick-and-mortar retailers that respondents said provide the mostvalue are all brands that push low pricing: Target, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sears, Old Navy and Marshall’s, in that order. Hmmm.

(By the way, the YouGov questionnaire takes pains to ask respondents to divorce value from pricing. That’s good. But respondents to their online surveys are self-selected. That’s not so good.)

Thankfully, you don’t have to be there

Of course, you can subject yourself to the rigors of Black Friday shopping in the comfort of your own home. Amazon has stretched Black Friday into a whole week and has a button for their deals at the upper right-hand corner of their home page. “We’re searching for the best Black Friday deals everywhere — including Black Friday deals other stores are planning — so we can meet or beat their prices and bring them to you even earlier,” the site claims.

You win the game of chicken

The question retailers are grappling with is how low they can go and how soon, according to Marzilli. “For retailers, it’s a game of chicken,” he explains.

Like most games in the free marketplace, it’s you, the consumer, who wins. Which is yet one more thing to be thankful for.