Archive for the 'Corporate Marketing 101' Category
Monday, May 7th, 2012
Age of Wonders
Good news, fellow Earthicans: Our heroic epoch’s leading minds shall never cease their valiant, world-historic labors to solve the great challenges of the perilous times. According to the latest Advertising Age:
Few people would suspect that what’s inside an unmarked building some 30 miles north of New York could change __(a)__, even the entire __(b)__. But that’s what __(c)__’s ambitious, high-energy __(d)__ are promising.
This unassuming office park houses the __(e)__ Lab, and inside are the results of months of intense research. __(f)__ have been working to chart a new course for a __(g)__ that has endured __(h)__, just behind __(i)__.
Over several weeks early this year, Brad Jakeman, president-__(j)__ officer, has walked key __(k)__ constituents around the lab, talking about ideas and showing off mock-ups of new __(l)__ machines, samples of __(m)__ and new __(n)__ concepts. It’s a world where __(o)__ specifically — and the __(p)__ generally — is __(q)__ again.
He insists it’s not a pipe dream.
Answer key:
(a) = the way consumers view a soda brand
(b) = cola category
(c) = Pepsi
(d) = marketers
(e) = Beverage
(f) = Pepsi execs
(g) = brand
(h) = an embarrassing slip to the No. 3 soda
(i) = Diet Coke
(j) = global enjoyment and chief creative
(k) = Pepsi
(l) = new vending and fountain
(m) = licensed products
(n) = marketing
(o) = Pepsi
(p) = cola category
(q) = cool
And some dare question the entrepreneurial system!
Friday, January 27th, 2012
The Obama Proof
Back in 2008, your humble TCT blogmaster still retained some pretty big illusions about the existence of democracy in corporate capitalist America.
Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.
Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane. Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation. The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low. Coke or Pepsi. Jack Johnson or John Jackson.
And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Visa’s Fools
“Follow the flattery.” That is former Village Voice ad critic Leslie Savan’s sage counsel to would-be critics of advertising. As Savan knows, ego-stroking is one of the core tactics of big businesses’ efforts to manipulate our off-the-job behaviors.
Enter, on cue, Visa’s new Facebook “app,” the Visa Memory Mapper. The users of this scheme take vacations and, during or after, upload photos of their trips, add captions explaining the photos, and then select music and formats to turn the photos and captions into a “movie” about the vacation in question. All, purportedly, in the name of recording memories.
One might begin to sense the rat here when one reflects upon the true relationship between cameras, Facebooking, and experiences of uncommon or new locales. Which is likely to yield better memories — immersing oneself in a place with perhaps a few quick photos taken, or having a camera glued to one’s nose for a serious share of time in a spot? What possible place does Facebook have in the process?
The JWT Intelligence (yes, an arm of that JWT) blog clarifies the real logic:
Where travelers of old shared (and bragged about) their activities upon returning home, today’s hyper-connected and mobile-enabled vacationers enjoy the instant gratification of doing so on social networks in real time. These updates amplify the travel experience, providing the opportunity to broadcast how cool (or privileged, worldly, etc.) the traveler is, boosting the person’s social currency. Indeed, one-third of respondents in JWT’s U.K. and U.S. survey agreed that “Sharing my travel activities makes me stand out from everyone else’s activities in my social network.” Visa is smartly tapping into this new social currency by facilitating online boasting for its customers.
And, of course, the raison d’etre of this latest encouragement and exploitation of human vanity in our increasingly atomized (and therefore increasingly vain) society lies 100 percent in the realm of marketing research. Promo Magazine reports:
“What’s interesting about the social space is that you can measure the different elements of performance, not only from an impression, but also from paid media and now earned media, or the sharing of what people are doing with their friends,” Alex Craddock, head of North America Marketing for Visa Inc., said. “When you look at that as a success metric, you get a good sense of how the social space can be for you. There is so much data there, and with the triangulation of these findings you actually can be very well informed about how a campaign is forming in real time.”
Monday, November 7th, 2011
Terracycle: Greenwashers All the Way Down
When “eco-capitalists” get involved, the level of dishonesty inherent in capitalism goes up. Facts not mentioned in ordinary corporate operations turn into active, heavily researched tricks and deceptions.
Consider Terracycle, the scam being run by college drop-out Tom Szaky.
Terracyle claims to be an “upcycler,” purportedly taking used products and packages and making them into supposedly “green” new products.
Of course, though you’d never know it from the fawning coverage it receives in the capitalist press, the operation doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny, even from the outside.
Consider the product by which Terracycle got itself off the ground — garden fertilizer sold in re-used soda bottles. The obvious two questions about this stuff? First, what happens to the empty bottles after the fertilizer is gone? Second, given that Terracycle is a “partner” with both Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay/Pepsi, isn’t Terracycle actually yet another device for pre-empting bottle bills, to say nothing of its role in preventing people from questioning the explosion of plastic drink packaging in the first place?
Meanwhile, consider the degree of green-ness of this:
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Exhibit G
TCT readers are aware of the Herman/Chomsky “propaganda model” theory of corporate capitalist media operation. As such, they are also aware of the special importance of parallel cases for testing said explanation.
Consider then, this, the announcement that neo-fascist media star Glenn Beck will be one of the featured speakers this year at Advertising Age‘s Media Evolved Conference. The topic of this yearly professional soiree for marketing operatives is “smarter approaches to traditional media buying, the ways social media can enhance consumer engagement with content including TV, brands’ increasing opportunities to create their own media, and how to best use the proliferating platforms, channels and outlets.”
I mention this fact because Beck’s appearance at Media Evolved is far weightier evidence of the accuracy of the propaganda model than almost anything that can be gleaned from observation of broadcasts/content. It is one thing for Beck to be featured as a provider of media content. It is quite another, and far deeper, thing for him to be invited into the media planning stage.
Can you imagine the overclass shitstorm that would occur if Noam Chomsky or even David Barsamian or Amy Goodman were invited to discuss how the media are planned and run, rather than just what they broadcast? It is literally unimaginable, of course, that such would ever happen, precisely because of the certainty and intensity of the ensuing shitstorm.
In terms of evidence for judging the Herman and Chomsky model, the reality that Glenn Beck is an invitee to the most boilerplate and big-time of media planning events trumps just about anything you could think of from the media-output side of the story. Advertising Age is a 100 percent venerable, mainstream corporate capitalist enterprise, and remains a standard tool of the Fortune 500 boardroom. Its Media Evolved Conference co-sponsors include McCann Worldwide, the world’s largest advertising agency group, and a host of other major corporate marketing-servicers. Beck’s Media Evolved co-speakers are field marshals and top spies from a phalanx of big business pace-setters. Would any of these operations or personages risk their access to corporate cash by associating themselves with Chomsky, Barsamian, or Goodman? Not a chance. But Glenn Beck? He causes not a ripple. QED.
Meanwhile, for those interested in media studies, this is also more evidence of what a mistake it is to follow the convention therein of focusing first and foremost on media content and advertising, rather than media planning and corporate marketing. Important as they are, the former are mere symptoms of the latter processes, which are themselves mere symptoms of the continuing reign of corporate capital.
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Adam Smith Has Left the Building
The rather Cardassian-looking personage at right is Robert A. “Bob” McDonald, Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO of the Procter & Gamble corporation. He was interviewed recently by Advertising Age on the topic of why P&G continues to pump out dividends to its shareholders, despite the Great Recession. The answers he gave are textbook confirmation of the profound difference between corporate and classic capitalism.
Recall that, despite the centrality of price-slashing to the ideal capitalist system described by Adam Smith, in practice, nobody hates price reductions more than capitalists. Explaining his 1892 decision to sell Edison Electric to the investment ring that was seeking to form the General Electric corporation, Thomas Alva Edison confided to The New York Times:
Recently, there has been a sharp rivalry between the [existing] companies, and prices have been cut so that there is little profit in the manufacture of electrical machinery for anybody. The consolidation of the companies will give the added advantage that a large concern has over a small one. It will give a larger working capital. It will do away with a competition that has become so sharp that the product of the factories has been worth little more than ordinary hardware… I do not know that there will be any increase in prices, but there should be an increase of 3 or 4 percent in the profits by the simple advantage of placing all of the interests under one management….I simply want to get as large dividends as possible from such stock as I hold.
Big, conglomerate, merger-forming, unregulated corporations (a.k.a., our ruling institutions today) were knowingly sought and obtained by frustrated capitalist investors precisely as a means of restricting price competition.
Within a few decades, the newly empowered investor-barons found that their success in this direction also made it possible to launch what we now know as marketing, a.k.a. studied managerial manipulation of the off-the-job behaviors of prospective customers, and to thereby further accelerate profit-making.
By diverting to marketing some of the steadily rising revenues made possible by constant price increases, big businesses could have their cake and eat it, too. People paid higher and higher prices, funding not only expanding returns on shareholder investments, but also the ever-expanding brainwashing effort on which those returns were increasingly premised. In essence, the new pricing power permitted corporate capitalists to collect a private tax and spend it on the marketing race, to the primary benefit of their owners’ portfolios.
I mention all this again because, in his Ad Age interview, Mr. McDonald confirms how the whole thing works.
“[W]e don’t signal pricing to competition, which is illegal and unethical,” says McDonald, in the mandatory pro forma nod to the prevailing agreement that a lack of old-fashioned price-fixing klatches somehow means co-respective pricing isn’t the norm.
So what do P&G managers do instead?
McDonald explains:
They make price increases, then “it takes competitors about a month or two to recognize you are pricing and about a month or two to decide to execute their price increase and then another six months to actually execute their price increase.”
In other words, they “don’t signal pricing to competition,” but they do make price changes then pay very close attention to whether competitors will co-operate on the hikes (and they usually do).
So, no (or at least not usually) secret meeting, but everybody knows how the system works, and very few ever buck it. Different process, same intent and same results:
P&G plans additional price hikes early next calendar year to recoup commodity costs and currency changes, but is about two-thirds of the way through price increases, he said.
Overall, P&G posted results in-line with analyst expectations, with organic sales up 4% to $21.9 billion and fully diluted net earnings per share up 1% to $1.03, as commodity costs continued to eat into margins despite price increases.
Under Bob’s leadership, P&G has grown sales by an average of nearly four percent per year over the past two years; core earnings per share an average of nearly seven percent; and adjusted free cash flow 106%. The Company has delivered these results despite significant economic headwinds, including slow to no growth in developed markets and rising commodity costs.
On the strength of these results, P&G has paid about $5.5 billion in dividends, returned over $6 billion to shareholders through the repurchase of P&G stock, and marked the 121st consecutive year that P&G has paid a dividend.
P.S. Bob also makes a highly interesting comment on the continuing polarization of American society:
“I don’t really see a dramatic change in consumer behavior,” Mr. McDonald said, compared to what consumers have been doing since 2008. Unemployed consumers continue to look for good value and sometimes trade down, he said. “But at the same time you’ve got people at the higher end of the economic pyramid doing extremely well and continuing to trade up.
In mainstream politics and media, it’s still a “middle-class” society. At the commanding heights of “the economic pyramid,” they know better.
