Marketing Mojo With Stephanie Fierman

The teenage jury is in: Abercrombie & Fitch’s cross-channel marketing/ hype machine leaves just about everyone else in the dust.  Launched in 1892, I suspect that former shoppers Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Amelia Earhart and Clark Gable would scarcely recognize the clothier whose soft-core porn advertising/experience that has turned the chain into a cultural icon (well, maybe Gable would feel at home…).

Since rebooting the brand in 1988, A&F has broken from the teen pack by courting controversy everywhere it goes.  Let us count the ways…

Because just about every retailer has a catalog and everyone’s catalog is free (ho-hum), A&F created a separate lifestyle magazine full of black-and-white photographs taken by Bruce Weber, the photographer best known for highlighting ”the beauty of youth in male nude photography” (as taken verbatim from his own website).   There were so many protests over A&F Quarterly (which the company sells - further stoking desire among teens)  that the company suspended publication for awhile; it’s hard to say whether it was the magalog’s porn star interviews or the b&w shots of Santa and Mrs. Santa Claus in flagrante that pushed thousands of parents and a few governors and attorneys general over the edge… who’s to say?

Such outrage, of course, only pushed the Quarterly to greater, more mythical heights, stoking the company’s good-but-bad-boy (emphasis on ”boy”) reputation.  Go online right now to witness the hysteria it generated in 2003. Totally un-cool Bill O’Reilly, a series of religious organizations and others called for boycotts, and articles concerned with “cultural decay” screamed out with headlines like “Abercrombie & Fitch Stops Selling Porn.“  Parental boycotts? Porn?  Thongs for pre-teens, according to Bill O’Reilly? [Don’t think too much about that one.]  All like catnip to your underage kitty.  Meee-ow!

A&F Quarterly has recently been reintroduced (in Europe, not the US) with a promise from the company that it would no longer be sold to individuals under the age of 18 and that there would be less of everything that made it hot in the first place.  Nevertheless, I wouldn’t expect any A&F articles on the virtues of abstinence anytime soon.

On the ground, it appears that the company used the Quarterly’s hiatus period to begin focusing on customer service and the stores.  A new CEO was brought in from Gucci which - at 46,000 feet - now boasts the largest luxury store in the world right here on New York’s Fifth Avenue.  Gucci knows how to push the rags.  The CEO beefed up store staffing and there are now greeters at the front of every store, in addition to at least one employee inside covering each sales section.  But what is A&F’s spin?  A&F hires male models as greeters, who may literally be standing out on the sideway, stirring up - whatever.  The company further inflates the aspiration by “casting” for such greeters on its website, where the pages pulsate with club music accompanying a video of store events where the models are decidedly half-naked and the customers are clearly under 18.  If you are interested in becoming a model for A&F, you’re asked for a photo, your height, your weight… and the name of the mall nearest you.   ‘Cuz you may be pretty, but don’t ever forget why you’re here.

A&F’s been knocking around in my head for some time, but the impetus for this post was an experience this past Labor Day weekend.  Marketing Mojo was merrily cruising down NYC’s Fifth Avenue until running headlong into a case of gridlock at 57th Street.  What could it be?  Celebrities (pretty typical in these here parts…)?  No, it was a huge mass of people standing in front of A&F’s flagship store, waiting to get in and taking pictures of what definitely seemed to be a highlight of their day.  There were two beautiful young male models standing at the door controlling entry, and a line of people behind a velvet rope that snaked around the corner.  A velvet rope.  2008’s version of Studio 54/Limelight/China Club (all of which the Mojo’s under-18 friends snuck into) is… Abercrombie & Fitch. 

There is no question that A&F has made some wrong moves, particularly in the area of diversity.  Several years ago, the company made t-shirts that it considered fun and tongue-in-cheek.  Just about everyone else, including many college student organizations, considered them racist.  And in 2004, the company settled a $50 million class action lawsuit brought by former employees who claimed that the company was happy to hire African-Americans, Asians, Filipinos and other minorities… as long as they worked in the stores’ stockrooms and not out on the selling floor.   

Ergo, the stupid, screwed up (and illegal) side of presenting the ”Caucasian, football-looking, blonde-hair, blue-eyed, skinny, tall male” as everyone’s ideal.  

Fast forward to 2008, and the company is making progress.  Today, the company claims that minorities make up 32% of its sales staff.  It also has a  huge “Diversity” section on its website.  Of course this is A&F, so the section plays a video loop that features Asians, Latinos and African-Americans - all of whom are gorgeous and (most of whom are) in some state of undress.  The company can’t give up everything!

[Nota bene: An employee recently claimed that A&F has simply shifted its discriminatory ways toward not hiring ”ugly” people, with the company’s ”hierarchy of hotness” dictating just about everything.  And not hiring unattractive people (across all ethnic groups) is very hard to outlaw, according to a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the original 2004 case.] 

Based on 20 years of business experience, the Mojo has absolutely no doubt that A&F’s lawyers and senior management are fully cognizant of what they’re doing, and believe that a nuisance lawsuit or two is worth preserving the highly profitable fantasy world they’ve created.  And by doing so, A&F taps into its target consumer’s impressionable zeitgeist like few others do - or have the nerve to do.
Abercrombie & Fitch  back to school shopping  clothing retail

I’ve written at least one post on corporate blogging before, but I gave them a little more thought this week.

This was because I ran a break-out group at this week’s CMO Club summit on PR 2.0, which I would loosely define as the new practices, policies and opportunities available to individuals and companies based on the digital innovations we all fondly call Web 2.0.

So I created a hand-out, which included such items such as how to track blogs, monitor Twitter tweets, figure out when to social(ly) network and so on.

One of the more active conversations focused on the topic of corporate blogs - notably, when should a company consider creating one? My top rules are that a corporation might consider a corporate blog when:

1. Two-way, honest conversations between senior management and both employees as well as consumers are already part of the company culture (think Sun and Stonyfield Farm)

2. Roles and responsibilities for the blog are clear and there is genuine commitment to (a) constant maintenance and (b) responding immediately (or at least promptly) to a problem

3. The company is prepared – both short-term and long-term – for what Kathy Sierra calls “the physics of passion.”

[NOTE: The famous corporate blogger Robert Scoble delivers the corporate blog manifesto here]

I guess I neglected what should be Rule #4: Your CEO isn’t a looney tune or, at minimum, far to colorful for public consumption.

Case in point: Dov Charney, Founder and CEO of American Apparel. Today’s WSJ includes an article on how American Apparel’s CFO has resigned after Charney called him “a complete loser” while sitting for a WSJ interview in March. Now that’s a bad performance appraisal!

In the past, Charney has gotten into hot water for engaging in completely inappropriate behavior during magazine interviews, having inappropriate (there’s that word again) encounters with company employee, hiring models from local strip bars, having scantily-clad employees serve him meals (at home), running around the office in his underwear and referring to women in ways that even he says he wouldn’t use with his mother.  His claim to fame (that, in my opinion, unfortunately outshines his philanthropy and US manufacturing-centric ethos) is that he’s been sued for sexual harassment more times than Joe Francis.

The photo is from an American Apparel “Apres Ski” advertisement. That’s Dov on the left.

It remains to be seen how he does once several quarters as a public company sinks in. In the meantime: no corporate blogs, please!

The year is 1978. Disco, clubs, those long sparkly gold and silver scarves a bunch of us wore around our necks trying to look/be cool. Christie Brinkley was the model of the day and Billy Joel’s 52nd Street was the #1 album of the year - Big Shot was the anthem of the wild New York coked-up beauty queen. My contemporary, Brooke Shields, played a 12-year-old prostitute in Pretty Baby. Star Wars had come out the year before and the idea that Times Square would someday look like Disneyworld would have been preposterous.

I was young, but just old enough to realize boys existed and that there might something remotely interesting going on there. Rod Stewart’s cheesy disco song Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? moved me. I had absolutely no clue why, but it did. Big time. I suspect that you have a few embarrassing yet sacred songs like this one, even though you’d never admit it.

So last night I hear the song coming from my TV and look up from the newspaper to see a huge claymation Chips Ahoy cookie singing “If ya want my body, and ya think I’m sexy, come on sugar let me know/If you really need me just reach out and touch me…” to a blonde female claymation figure sitting on (the bachelor cookie’s) couch looking - uh - hungry. Here’s the ad:



I was - plundered. Horrified. I mean, I’d seen Bob Dylan shilling for Victoria’s Secret and heard the resulting cries of angst but it hadn’t affected me: wrong coming-of-age decade. But now, Nabisco had taken my delicate young girl memories and, and, turned them into a chocolate chip cookie! Have they no shame? Will marketing people stop at nothing??

And the commercial most certainly did not make me want a cookie!

My friends and I sometimes get a good laugh out of trying to picture the client/agency meeting that spawned an idea. Picture it: you are the cookie brand/category manager at Nabisco and someone suggests Da Ya Think I’m Sexy for Chips Ahoy. What. Goes. Through. Your. Mind?

Oh well. I’ll be ok. But if anyone uses Yvonne Elliman’s If I Can’t Have You to sell a candy bar, I’m a goner.

P.S. Oh. My. G-d. At this very moment, Meatleaf is singing a version of Paradise by the Dashboard Light (1977) in a TV ad for the AT&T GoPhone. Except this time, it’s Paradise By the GoPhone Light. I have to go lay down.

Rod StewartChips Ahoy”Do you think I’m sexy””Do you think I’m sexy””Paradise by the Dashboard Light””Paradise by the GoPhone Light”

TV On The Web Becoming Broadly Popular
OK, watching television shows on the web finally appears to be “mainstreaming.”  80 million Americans – 43% of the online U.S population – have watched one of their favorite shows on the Web, and this is up from 25% only one year ago.

It’s a sign of real experimentation that HBO is airing all episodes of their new show, In Treatment, for free online here.  I’m sure there was a great deal of discussion about whether this move would anger paying subscribers, but a 5-night-a-week show can be a tough sell (who has the time, and not everyone TIVOs…) so this is clearly a move to generate viewing and word of mouth among existing subs and to potentially win new viewers. PBS is also boosting its presence on the web, adding exclusive online-only material to its YouTube channel and posting other (sometimes longer-form) content on its website to reach younger viewers.


SUPER BOWL XLII ADS AND MARKETABILITY
Super Bowl XLII may be all but a distant memory right now but viewers are still reliving the ads – on MySpace, Hulu, YouTube and AOL Sports, just to name a few.

Here are a some interesting tidbits:
- 70% of advertisers bought keywords related to their names, a 20% increase over last year’s game.
- 6% (6%!!) of the marketers’ commercials asked viewers to visit their websites, a decrease of nearly two-thirds from the 2007 game.
- Of the ads that displayed a website URL, only 12% used a voiceover to create a call to action.

And if I’m going to talk about Super Bowl marketability, it’d be hard to ignore GoDaddy. With its pre-game claims that Fox had rejected this ad, GoDaddy broadcast a tamer version featuring Danica Patrick and no more taste than they exhibited last year. However, GoDaddy is in a highly competitive space, its prices are cheap and the service is good:  and by the end of the following day, 2 million visitors had gone to the site, vs. only 500,000 last year.  It’s hard to argue with that.

Most of the post-game debate focused on whether or not the most-loved ads would produce sales.  To leverage the ads completely, an advertiser must manage across both TV and Web not just during the game, but after.  At a very basic level, please make the ad easy to find once the game has ended.  Better yet, make a post-game viewing experience flow seamlessly into the sales process or, at least, put the ad closeby!  E*Trade is doing a great job at this (see its home page here as of Feb 10).  Luckily this gives the Mojo an excuse to highlight its favorite ads, the E*Trade baby spots.  And hey, clowns ARE creepy!


super bowletradegodaddyadvertising

I’ve long followed the interesting and well-chronicled careers of Mark DiMassimo of DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO) and Eric Yaverbaum, who runs Ericho Communications and has written a number of bestselling books.   Together or apart, they’ve been the marketing minds behind a who’s who of successful brands including Ikea, Dominos Pizza, Progressive Insurance, Glaceau Vitamin Water, Crunch Fitness and Jet Blue.   

Now Eric and Mark have taken on a much different assignment:  that of helping the planet.  Their focus is not greenhouse gases but bottled water, and they’re doing so through the launch of a joint venture called Tappening and a huge educational media blitz.  Tappening asks everyone to send in one empty commercial water bottle with a note inside that commits the sender to drinking only tap water in the future.  The initiative also calls companies like Coca-Cola on the carpet for creating massive waste:   did you know that California alone throws out three million empty water bottles every day?   You can also get a uber-hip Tappening bottle to carry your tap water around in.  Or, rather, you could before the bottles sold out in the first 36 hours of the campaign.  [See below for a nice shot of the bottles and a handy link to a FoxNews interview about Tappening.]

I spoke to both Mark and Eric today to get a rare look behind a grass-roots campaign that’s getting major attention – one based on the power of what they call two  “mad dads.”

Stephanie:  Hey, guys.  From what I’ve read so far, this idea seems to have sprouted from the minds of two angry marketing geniuses who’d just seen a documentary about trash.  True?

Mark:  Well I can’t address the “genius” part, but we’re definitely angry.  I have three kids and they deserve a healthy planet.  That means we’re going to have to do a little more than change light bulbs.

Eric: As parents, Mark and I are very much aligned emotionally in this.  And we believe that we can impact a lot of people.

Stephanie: And just to get it out of the way early… you’re also making some money, right?

Mark: When you sell your entire inventory of bottles in the first 36 hours, you definitely make a few bucks, although we’ve been shocked at the response. We thought we’d sell out our inventory in a year and just self-fund the initiative.  But apparently we’re onto something!

Eric:   Yes, selling out after 36 hours and logging 450,000 page visits in two weeks tells us that, based on what we do for a living, we have the wherewithall to educate people – and we’re succeeding.

Stephanie:  I personally have no issues with two marketing execs making a few dollars by spending every spare waking hour doing something good for the planet.  But why promote tap water? 
 
Mark:  Because it was there, because it’s everywhere – and because it wasn’t branded.  And all three of us understand the power of brands.  Look at vodka, a drink with no taste.  But branding has given plenty of vodka brands taste.  And a brand makes people pay good money for good old H2O in a bottle every day.  And what’s even in that bottle?  Pepsi admits that Aquafina, the #1 bestselling brand of bottled water in the US, comes from tap water!   Tap water deserves to fight, if you will, on equal footing.  Reusable water bottles and the Tappening brand is where we wanted to start.

Eric: People don’t realize so many really sad and fundamental facts regarding what we do to the planet.  The bottled water industry adds to global pollution, wastes energy, creates waste and contributions to the causes of climate change.  The industry’s solution so far has been to talk about thinner plastic and recycling.  Thinner plastic still needs to be made, cleaned, filled, shipped, collected and discarded.   And nearly 25% of Americans do not recycle.  Tap water is right in front of us:  we believe that something so simple can be very powerful.

Mark: And by the way, the stuff in the bottle isn’t as well regulated as the stuff that comes out of your tap.  Compare what the EPA requires of your tap water to what the FDA looks at in your bottled water.  See who makes you feel better about what you’re drinking.  But the bottom line is that, on the whole, the water from your tap is healthy for you, healthy for your family and a whole lot healthier for the planet.  Take the money you save and put it to good use, if you can.

Eric: That’s also what we’re also trying to do by using a portion of the proceeds from every Tappening bottle sale to promote the documentary you mentioned called Garbage!  The Revolution Starts at Home.   Now they are starting to get traffic from our site… and that’s the way you start to bind thousands of people together behind a cause.

Stephanie: Interesting.  Do you see marketing discipline as the solution to other social problems?

Mark: Yes, marketing and value innovation.  It would be of enormous value to get people drinking more tap and less bottled.  So we look at that problem and we innovate.  Why don’t people drink more tap?  And we don’t disregard or belittle the answers we don’t like:  if drinking tap isn’t hip, for example, then we need to address that.  Scientists may study it.  Politicians may demagogue it, legislate it…  But we know that what really moves the needle quickly is marketing innovation, which is about design, branding and excitement.

Eric: People buy brands to express themselves and their values.  Tappening allows people to be part of this campaign, which we hope is both a stylish and socially valuable thing to do. Maybe that’s why so many people like our bottle. It brands them when they carry it.

Stephanie: So you want to make an ordinary-seeming topic cool.

Eric: Definitely.  Hey, I have a teenage daughter to impress! That’s not easy!

Mark: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Tappening IS cool.

Stephanie: How important has digital marketing been to your success?

Mark:  Incredibly. We were blown away by the celebrities who found our MySpace page and spread the word.

Eric: And all the environmental organizations online….  The bloggers also have gotten the word out, and they’ve been collaborators in developing our concept.  A lot of hard questions in this space need to be answered. And bloggers ask them. They don’t cow-tow to anyone.  To them, I would offer the biggest thank you.

Mark:  Traditional media has driven our success as well.  We and others are spreading video from TV interviews we have done all over the web. We’re getting newspaper and radio coverage.  It all ends up in digital form and then it travels everywhere.

Eric:  The doom and gloom predictions about the future of mainstream media fascinate me, because “old” and “new” media work so well together:  traditional media produces high-quality content and then the web spreads it around the world.  Given that both Mark and I are usually the “senders” of such messaging for our clients, it’s been a blast to be on the *positive* receiving end of it!

Stephanie:  Well many thanks to you both.  And if you have any Tappening bottles squirreled away… I want one!
———
Readers:  consider what Mark and Eric are saying about the phenomenon of branding, the social quality and power of “cool,” and the idea that this concept could be applied to just about anything.  What can we apply it to next?
tappeningbottled waterMark DimassimoEric Yaverbaum

If you’re anything like me, you have set aside the strategic plan and final 2008 budget deliverables due to your boss next week to do something really important:  plan your Halloween costume! 

“Reputation management” is certainly nothing new in the worlds of marketing and business.  A company’s reputation is its #1 asset, and organizations spend countless hours and dollars with advisors and PR firms to make sure their messaging is just right.  Certainly individuals care about their reputations just as much, but it’s not been my experience that the regular person, on average, thinks about actively protecting his or her own reputation. 

But as they say, “the Internet has changed everything.” Where once a newspaper article or TV segment might appear and be gone the next day, the Internet now permits anyone to post anything about any topic, whether it be true or false, and such content is often posted anonymously.  And then this questionable content hangs out on the search engines… forever.  While we all applaud the seemingly limitless amount of global news and information the Web literally brings into our homes every day, how much of it is credible when there are no filters?  How do you decide what is true and not – and do most people even try?  I’ve certainly seen my share of urban legend, business rumor and celebrity talk online, but never stopped to really consider or question the quality of the content I was seeing or the judgments I was making about the individuals being written about based on that information. 

This can happen to anyone – and will, in greater and greater numbers.  Only in the last two days a post by Henry Blodgett on Silicon Alley Insider about possible AOL layoffs unleashed a stream of anonymous posts from employees and former employees (146 in a little over two days, so far) not only about the company, but about current AOL executives that these anonymous individuals believe should be fired.  Names are named.   And then other anonymous people jump on the bandwagon.  And like a car wreck you see on the other side of the guardrail, I knew that I couldn’t believe anything on the page and that I should look away, but I didn’t.  One post names 27 executives that deserve to be “whack[ed].”  We also learn that at least one of AOL’s senior executives has questionable and discriminatory motives.  How are these executives to respond?  How will you respond in the future when it’s your turn? 

I am responding by doing exactly what I’ve been doing for companies for the last twenty years – that is, advising brands on how to get their messaging out in an authentic and successful way.  But this time you and I are the brands, and we need to work just as hard to make sure that what’s out there in the world is a true representation of who we are.  Not only do we deserve that, but the people who look for information about us on the Internet deserve that, too. 

This is the first of several posts I’ll be writing on the topic of online reputation management – that is, your reputation.  Stay tuned.
“company reputation”“how google works”“anonymous web posts”“first amendment” and web“identity theft”“anonymous blog posts”

Caption: Sharing a love for upscale accessories, mega-mom Angelina Jolie and daughter Zahara, 2, step out in matching mommy-and-me Valentino “Histoire” handbags during a trip to a New York City park. [PEOPLE MAGAZINE]

Naturally, because my first post on my first blog was about Neil Howe’s and William Strauss’ predictions of kids in the future returning to a more wholesome, positive-values, altruistic place in the world, I’ve found nothing but amusing individual cases to the contrary ever since.

And while I suppose that no one would expect celebrity kids to fit into this trend necessarily, starting with those who are literally pre-verbal is over the top. For most.

Most of my marketing friends have not had the experience of managing actual, living people as “brands.” What must that be like?

Do you remember when Tom Cruise fired longtime PR agent-to-the-stars Pat Kingsley, replaced her with his sister and proceeded to transform into a lunatic? Who can forget his assessment of psychiatry on Today or his couch-leaping action on Oprah? Of course, this means that Cruise had always been a nut and Kingsley had been earning her fee for a long, long time. And then there are the poor souls who manage Lindsey and Paris and Her and Him and…

Consider this. You are a marketer at P&G or Citibank. Things happen, sure, but you don’t have what must be a particular kind of fear that you will awake on any random morning to see your brand of paper towel or toothpaste humiliating itself at the Chateau Marmont, falling down in the street or driving drunk for the upteenth time without a license.  Since I began running sales and marketing for Time Warner’s DC Comics division, there hasn’t been a single night that I sat home, worrying that Superman was out with Catwoman, getting drunk and punching paparazzi.  (But that Green Lantern??  Don’t get me started!  I’m kidding) 

I thought of all this when – right after my post on the wholesomeness of Disney’s High School Musical franchise – the movies’ lead actress was forced to admit that a very nude photo of her on the Internet was indeed her in a “private” moment (I can’t bring myself to offer a link – check out PerezHilton). Of course this is not Disney’s or her manager’s fault, and if Ms. Hudgens didn’t tell them they could not have known of the photo’s existence – but what kind of antacid goes with this kind of moment? Oy.

So the next time you look at your lawn care product samples and long for excitement, imagine that you’ve changed careers and you’re happy. You and your product’s celebrity endorser, Clay Aiken, have worked so hard since his run on American Idol.  Sure, the constant questions about his personal life make it a little challenging to build him up as a teen girl heartthrob, but you just know that his huge talent will prevail. You lean over, give your Clay Aiken bobblehead doll one more tap on the head, and fall asleep.

Then you wake up and turn on the tv/open the newspaper/fire up the Internet. And at that very moment, Lawncare never. Looked. So. Good.