Ram Rash or How I Got A Case of the Dodge in Europe

Ram Rash?

This seems to be the flip side of the Dr Z campaign in Europe, as Daimler-Chrysler starts to come together as a unified company. Is Ram Rash contagious? What's the viral capability? Ram Rash was first identified by honorary field agent Jason.

Is Dr. Z too Euro for America? Is Dodge too American for Europe?

UPDATE: JULY 31 From AdAge

It seems as though a basic step in uncertainty reduction was missed, as seven of 10 potential consumers surveyed didn't know that Dr. Z is a real person, let alone the CEO. Ouch. $221mm has been spent on the campaign so far.

The Hubster Disaster or Co-Opted to Death

I went back to the WalMart social marketing site to see how the School Your Way/ Hubster disaster is taking shape. Perhaps I'm a glutton for punisment.

I have to believe that most traffic to this site is analogous to a gawker’s delay. It’s a car wreck – a completely sublime, yet intriguing, event that’s awful. You try and you try, but you can’t take your eyes off of it. This campaign is like Mike Peters (Jon Favreau) vs. the answering machine in SWINGERS. Painful and entertaining -- they'r not going to do something that stupid again...oh, yes they are.

My favorite part is the FAQ section of the site:

WHO’S BEHIND THIS GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?
The guys from Wal-Mart and Sony®
teamed up to bring you all the sweet stuff you’ll find on the HUB!

Sweet indeed.

Is Sony a new kiss of death when it comes to youth marketing? They teamed up with Ford for the ill-fated Flash Mobs.

Zune - iPod Throwdown

Microsoft Zune to compete with Apple's iPod. In hindsight, this post from a few months back must have been when the creative teams at Microsoft were working to develop Zune's packaging.

How well will Zune do? Will it crash as much as most Windows products? Will it fair better than the Sony Bean, the Dell DJ, etc.?

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.