Gah-gah for Google - Web Giant's Revenue Accounts for 24% of Total Online Income

From Ad Age

Published: July 20, 2006 NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- For the seventh time in eight quarters, Google beat the expectations of Wall Street, reporting today that it more than doubled second-quarter profit in comparison to last year. Google's strong earnings look all the more impressive in contrast to those of its main search competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft.

I'm interested in the cost-per-click advertising alternative descibed at the end of the article.

Primal Branding: Response & Reaction Part III (Conclusion)

To wrap up the discussion (lecture?) and critique of Primal Branding, I want to highlight where I think Hanlon could extend his research. Two key sections are the (1) shelf-life of a brand, identity, or community belief system; and (2) the competing reasons why one may participate in a rhetorical vision/community and carry a particular symbolic identity.

Rhetorical Vision Lifecycle: The Shelf-Life of a Brand
Without a theory, you can’t tell a fact from a non-fact. You don’t know if something is valuable or not, or why something may be important. A theory provides a lens to view the universe of phenomena in a meaningful way. SCT gives us the ability to see, understand, explain and predict symbolic phenomena and human behavior. When it comes to groups, teams, tribes, and communities, we have a parsimonious way to understand behavior (meaning, motive, identity, and emotion) by using the SCT lens.

Rhetorical visions (i.e. belief systems), are a living organism – they have a predictable lifecycle. The lifecycle can be shortened or extended (if you know what buttons and levers are useful in adjusting and framing the vision). The vision can be viral and spread like wildfire. However, your vison/campaign can also be inoculated against (competing visions become more compelling), or simply lose their life force.

The Life Cycle has five stages:
Consciousness Creating – the vision is created.
Consciousness Raising – the vision is raising awareness and chaining out.
Consciousness Sustaining – the vision is kept alive and must defend against competing visions.
Decline – the ‘old’ vision is being replaced by another ‘vision’ (think diffusions of innovations)
Death – the old vision dies and has no currency in the symbolic marketplace.

While all rhetorical visions go through these stages naturally, the timelines and accelerated or slowed down through a few examples:
Artistry – to what extent are the story tellers continuing to hold the attention of (and inspire) the cue-givers and the masses.
Here & Now – the vision is always in competition with other visions, to what extent can the keepers of the vision ground the drama in the here-and-now reality of its participants.
Inoculation – protect from competition, protect the core idea (the seeds of a rhetorical vision’s destruction are sewn in its genesis story).
Novelty & Redundancy – related to inoculation and the here-and-now phenomena, to what extent is the vision reaffirming and refreshing.

Position Structure
While people may participate in the same vision, they may get there for different reasons. As stated in an earlier post on this blog, we live in symbolically created world -- sometimes the rhetorical visions that make up our symbolic world overlap and sometimes they don't. Our symbol systems and world views can be segmented into seven symbolic visions or dramas. This is the foundation for Symbographic research. These dramas provide a lens through which we can see the way communities, tribes, organizations, customers segment and organize. The visions are righteous, social, pragmatic, social-righteous, social-pragmatic, righteous-pragmatic, and no vision. From a brand perspective, having no vision a dangerous place to be, as the market will position you. We can see this in the recent examples of Chevy and Walmart fighting their positioning as they try to grab the youth market.

It’s imperative to understand these competing (righteous, social, pragmatic) reasons for a vision or symbolic identity’s existence. They help you frame your story and “sell” your point of view.

Post Recaps: SCT Take-aways:
To end this series of posts on Primal Branding & SCT, here are a few take-aways:
* Without a good theory, you can’t tell a fact from a not-fact – you’re blind when it comes to the explanatory and predictive nature of a community’s actions (rooted in meaning, motive, identity, and emotion).
* Brands are more than belief systems.
* Symbolic Convergence provides a meaningful way to make sense of the symbolic realities in which your customer segments participate.
* Righteous, social, and pragmatic explanations exist to justify the existence of a symbolic reality or rhetorical vision.
* Position or be positioned

Walmart misses Target: Social Marketing

Oh, you like Little Debbies? So do I when I'm looking for a great deal on Tide with Bleach and Crest. So, do I. OMG!!! We should shop at Walmart together. CUL8R

Walmart misses Target... well, it misses the mark(et) with its new social networking experiment. They've tried upscale, organic, now kids, aka "hubsters", in their latest attempt to move away from NASCAR America.

From Ad Age:
"It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to
'express their individuality,' yet it screens all content, tells parents their
kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users
'hubsters' -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to
try to be cool."

Like Ford trying Flash Mobs, it looks foolish when you don't understand the here-and-now phenomena that motivates the "target" segment you desire. Even worse, it violates your core identity. Another bewildered marketing manager and a perplexed product manager scratch their heads and then ask "can we blog...wait, no we'll podcast our way to profitablitly." In the meantime, some double-speak counter agent promoting poor marketing practices just took $250K from your quarter spend.

Who's making the brand call on these campaigns??? -- maybe the same people that thought Chevy can be a "youth" market success or that a CMG campaign would work for Tahoe.

Walmart -- here are threevpieces of free advice:
1. Focus on what makes you unique, and ground that identity;
2. You can't be all things to all people; and
3. Learn some simple ways to translate your brand online from Sanctioning Agent

Predictive Air Fare - Farecast

A site that's getting a lot of buzz, and it's still in a beta release. Predictive airfare model -- very interesting.

The Long Tail

Great interview from All Things Considered. Chris Anderson of Wired discusses the long tail of retail.

Listen to the interview. Less is more; you can't be all things to all people; and the importance of authenticity.

The future of our culture -- and most business -- lies in niches, according to author Chris Anderson. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Anderson's new book, references a statistical trend to suggest that the market for items that are not "hits" will always be larger than that for the most popular items.

Anderson's position is that the Internet's ability to offer consumers a near-limitless choice of goods and information -- and archive it all cheaply -- will change how business is conducted. While "hits" will always exist, in Anderson's view the far larger number of products that fit a particular market or audience offer more opportunities.

Biz Blogs & The Consumer Generated Media Conundrum

Interesting article on business blogging & CGM via LOHAD.

Primal Branding: Response & Reaction Part II

IntroductionLast week I began my discussion to Hanlon’s Primal Branding. While I see the book helping move marketers in the right direction (that being a better understanding of the phenomena at play in audience groups and segments), it’s incomplete. Like Lewis Carbone’s Clued In, it’s as if they’re dealing with a ship in the bottle. They have most of the parts in there, but lack the tools to pull it all together to provide a rich explanation for human action as it relates to brand building.

I believe that Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT) has all of the parts and the tools needed to help make the abstract more concrete and actionable; as it has rich explanatory power that addresses the meaning, emotion, identity, and motives associated in a group’s (tribes, organizations, communities, etc) symbolic identity. Primal Branding claims that brands are a belief system that contains seven parts (creation story, creed, icon, ritual, sacred words, non-believers, and leader). These components are necessary but not sufficient when it comes to building a good brand and they do not capture the predictive utility of a good theory. Just because you have the ingredients, doesn’t mean you know how to make a recipe come to life, let alone tasty.

As Kurt Lewin said, there’s nothing more useful than a good theory. Simply put, a theory parsimoniously helps us understand, explain and predict phenomena. While some may scoff at theory saying “that’s fine in theory, but not in the real world.” Well, then you didn’t have a good theory. I’d be happy to discuss in another format, but for the sake of this series of posts, a “good” theory is incredibly useful when were trying to better understand the meaning, motive, identity, and emotion associated with group (audience segment) behavior.

So, let’s talk about SCT, by looking at its technical terms to start to understand its utility in understanding group behavior. Symbolic Convergence TheorySCT explains the what, the why and the how of group identity and behavior in a symbolic reality. SCT was developed/articulated over 30 years ago at the University of Minnesota. I’ve had the good fortune to study under, research with, and work for John Cragan, who along with Don Shields, is one of the world’s experts on SCT. Cragan has used SCT to guide much of his academic research, publications and a powerful consulting practice. I’ve built Sanctioning Agent as a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations understand the meaning, motive, identity and emotions at play as groups participate in a symbolic reality.

A good start for understanding SCT is by examining some of its technical terms and providing and some examples for each term.

SCT Technical Terms
Rhetorical Vision - The Rhetorical Vision is a composite dramas that catches up large groups of people in common symbolic reality. This vision contain fantasy themes that depict villains and heroes in action. The Rhetorical Vision represent symbolic facts that help groups that help participants make sense out of potential confusing events.
Exemplar: Citizens of a country, members of a religion, participants in political party or movement.

Saga – the oft told, or repeated stories, that describe achievments and events in the life of a person, community, or organization.
Exemplar: King Arthur, Jesus, The ’85 Bears, Abraham Lincoln, Jack Welch

Fantasy Theme - A dramatizing message that triggers the shared "fantasy" of those participating in a rhetorical vision. Fantasy Themes are manifested in the form of word, phrase or statement which interprets past events and envisions future events; and are used in consciousness creating, raising, sustaining; and are used to "kill" old or competing visions.
Exemplar: A scandal that uses “gate” to dramatize and recall Watergate; Neo/another.

Fantasy Type – a stock scenario used to explain new events and may be more specific than dramatic.
Exemplar: Restoration; fulfilling a promise; fetching good from evil

Symbolic Cue - The short-hand version of the fantasy theme; such as a code word, phase, slogan, sound bite, gesture or symbol. Parts of entire dramas and symbolic identities can be reduced a single cue that can trigger meaning, motive, identity, or emotion. – positively or negatively.
Exemplar: "X" (Malcolm X); the peace sign; a handshake; a bumper sticker.

Dramatic Personae – the characters in the vision; heroes, villains and supporting cast in the drama. Helps identify who’s in and who’s out.
Exemplar: Slackers, Sweathogs, Flash Mobbers, Dead Heads, FIBS, students

Scene – symbolic location of the dramatic action, where the action takes place.
Exemplar: the wild west, cyberspace, the hearts and minds; land of opportunity, the new frontier.

Rhetorical Community – groups of individuals who possess some symbolic commonality, or share some symbolic ground.
Exemplar: organized religion, members of a political party, students, union members

Sanctioning Agent - The individual, person, concept or thing that legitimizes the symbolic reality. Also the name of my consulting practice.
Exemplar: a religion or myth’s god, the constitution, an expert.

Value of SCT
By understanding SCT, its terms, and analysis via fantasy themes, communication and brand practioners can better understand how to understand, explain, and predicate actions, behaviors, meaning and emotion of its audience segments. As noted, “Primal Branding” and “Clued In” provide a description of the necessary components of a drama, they fail to have a predictive component of what will positively or negatively resonate with desired audience segments and the extent that there’s a shared group conciseness to those desired segments.

Next
The next post will:
1. Look at the lifecycle/shelf-life of a rhetorical vision or drama. Whether it’s a Warholian fifteen minutes or a millennia, all visions are created, raised, sustained, fall, and die. Understanding your brand’s lifecycle position is critical to creating meaningful campaigns.

2. Address the master analogs (position/segments) that compete for explanation within a community.

Primal Branding: Response & Reaction Part 1

A friend of mine recently recommended Patrick Hanlon's "Primal Branding." Overall, I find the book to be an easy read and appreciate Hanlon's ability to help marketing people move beyond the rote practices of awareness generation to a better understanding of how humans create communities around brand (or symbolic reality). However, I still find the explanations incomplete. I believe that the work done on Symbolic Convergence Theory is a more thorough and parsimonious explanation of human behavior. For many in marketing, it was an important evolutional step to understand the emotional connection that people have with brands - we do things for reasons the rational mind can't explain or understand on an empirical level. I believe Hanlon moves the dialog further in a more intelligent direction with "Primal Branding" yet I feel that if fails to explicitly account for the four major components any person, group or communities' connection to a "brand" (belief system, symbolic entity, etc). The four components are (1) meaning, (2) motive, (3) emotion, and (4) identity. SCT helps us continue to evolve our thinking around communities and symbolic identity.

These help get us on the road, but don't quite get us to the destination. Over the next week, I will post the similarities between Primal Brand and SCT (along with Sanctioning Agent's SymbolicID process and other big ideas in communication theory and practice) and ways that SCT can help you better understand the meaning, motives, emotions and identities associated with brands, symbolic realities, and communities. Topics to be covered include:

- Compare the technical terms or constructs between Primal Branding & SCT*

- Look at the shelf life/life cycle of symbolic realities

- Address the master analogues that compete for explanation in a symbolically created reality.

* Note: The technical terms of SCT (and Bormann's dramatism theory) have appeared in hundreds of articles from the 1970s to present day.