Women love the process of buying as much – if not more – than the transaction itself.

And that leads me to my secret source for marketing to women.  Skirt! magazine.  Skirt! is the brainchild of Nikki Hardin, and she has created editions in several markets.  It’s also available online at www.skirt.com.

This month’s cover quote says it all:

“The score never interested me, only the game.” – Mae West

That is precisely a reflection of women’s purchasing patterns.  It’s a ‘game,’ with multiple steps and multiple players.  And we need to understand those steps and players to earn the business from women.

Reading Skirt! provides a wonderful window to the mind and thought pattern of women.  I commend it.

“About four years ago they began focusing on large urban areas like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, places that also happen to have well-educated populations that are likely to find The Economist’s global perspective appealing. … [Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director and executive vice president for the Americas] said that above all else the magazine’s marketing tries to stir intellectual curiosity. But he acknowledged that some will inevitably see The Economist as a status symbol. “For some people it will be a badge, for some it won’t,” he said, adding that the magazine does not intentionally shoot for that image. “If we ever started to market ourselves to be cool, it would fail.”

That’s all well and good, and I took Mr. Rossi at his word that this flare-up of urban hipster interest was just a happy accident. Until… drum roll …I received this “Hookup” on August 25th from Flavorpill, the daily purveyors of all that is hip and cool. You tell me if the language in this e-mail blast isn’t trying to be “cool”?

“Talk more at dinner parties: The Economist discount. We’ve got your back on the cultural-news front, but there’s more going on in the world than art shows and rock antics. For a harder look at today’s issues, we recommend The Economist, which is like the less snobby version of your super-smart older sister. Because we so value well-rounded readers, we’re hooking you up with an excellent discount: 12 issues for just $12. This includes unrestricted access to The Economist online, for you glossy-paper-phobes; the Technology Quarterly supplement; 20 in-depth Special Reports a year; and the special issue The World in 2011. Subscribe now, and you’ll also be entered to win one of 20 copies of the wonderful graphic memoir War Is Boring. Sign up for The Economist, and soon you’ll be the one schooling sis.”

Even though I’m calling BS on Mr. Rossi’s claim that they’re not actively trying to “be cool,” I applaud The Economist, BBDO, Flavorpill, and whoever wrote the ad copy for the “Hookup” for keeping the brand fresh and relevant for bankers and hipsters alike. In carving out a brand position that preys on people’s ambitious and competitive natures, and sticking to it for as long as they have, BBDO deserves a lot of credit. The suggestion that, “… if you read The Economist, you’ll be just a little bit wiser and smarter than the average guy…” is really savvy and it works. The Economist has grown their subscription base in otherwise dire times, and they’re able to charge more for their product than any of their competition. That is cool.

>>>

By Jeremy W. PetersPublished: August 8, 2010

Its fire-engine-red logo peeks out of fashionable handbags and from the back pockets of designer jeans. Bankers read it in first-class seats. Hipsters read it on the subway on their way to work.

The magazine markets itself to the worldly.

It’s The Economist.

The newsweekly, a bible of global affairs for those who wear aspirations of worldliness on their sleeves, did not become a status symbol overnight. It took 25 years of clever advertising that tugs at the insecurities and ambitions of the status-seeking reader to help the magazine get there.

A standout among its less successful peers in the shrinking world of weekly news magazines, the true genius of The Economist, in fact, may have as much to do with its marketing as with its authoritative and often sardonic tone on exotic subjects, like a constitutional referendum in Kenya and the history of the vice presidency in Brazil.
Selling a publication with a title that conjures painful memories of college social science requirements can’t be easy. But the brand officers at The Economist and the advertising firm BBDO have devised a marketing strategy that makes people think reading the magazine will make them smarter and more sophisticated.

Their approach has been anything but subtle. “Once upon a time, there was an ambitious young man who didn’t read The Economist. The End,” read one particularly audacious ad from 2004. Another, from 1988 said, “I never read The Economist — Management Trainee. Age 42.” One from 2001 said, “Look forward to class reunions.”

The magazine’s latest advertising campaign in the United States, being introduced in 11 cities with well-off, well-educated populations, includes two slides that riff on the theme of social advancement. In one, an ostrich has his head buried in the ground. In the second, the bird’s head pops up through the ground right under the words “Get a world view. Read The Economist.”

“They’ve always implied that if you read The Economist, you’ll be just a little bit wiser and smarter than the average guy,” said Joseph Plummer, an adjunct professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and a former executive at McCann Worldgroup. “People want to get better most of the time. And I think in the case of The Economist, what they’re doing is adding a little bit of a wrinkle by appealing to a second emotion: competitiveness.”

Americans seem to be responding. Since the magazine first began printing a North American edition in early 1981, its circulation has increased more than tenfold. (It has published in Britain, where it has its headquarters, since 1843.)

When The Economist began reporting figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1982, it printed about 80,000 copies and sold fewer than 8,300 on the newsstand each week. As of its last accounting, for the first half of 2010, the magazine sold an average of about 52,000 on the newsstand each week and had a total weekly circulation of just under 823,000. Newsstand sales, however, are off 9 percent from more than 57,200 in the last six months of 2009, and the number of short-term subscribers is high.

Over the years, other newsweeklies have lost huge blocks of their readerships (Newsweek and Time), reduced the frequency of publication (U.S. News & World Report) or stopped producing a regular print edition altogether (Life).

Newsweek, which was sold last week to a 92-year-old stereo equipment tycoon for virtually nothing after The Washington Post Company said it could no longer afford to keep losing money on the magazine, has slashed its circulation to 1.6 million from about 3.1 million in 2000. Time’s circulation has been cut to about 3.3 million from 4.1 million in 2000.
But The Economist has always been a different kind of newsweekly. For one, it is more expensive than most American weeklies, adding to its status-symbol appeal. A yearlong subscription is generally at least $100, versus $39 for Newsweek and $20 for Time.

It is also edited in Britain, giving it a foreign flavor that marketing experts said many readers found alluring.
“This is something that’s been written mostly outside the United States,” said Lars Perner, an assistant professor of clinical marketing at the University of Southern California, who noted the magazine’s use of British spellings — programme and globalisation — even in its American editions. “That presumably adds a certain level of sophistication that readers find attractive.”

Despite its success in reaching American readers, The Economist’s executives felt there were more buyers to be found.
About four years ago they began focusing on large urban areas like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, places that also happen to have well-educated populations that are likely to find The Economist’s global perspective appealing.

The magazine’s branding executives have also carefully selected what stores can carry it, and not just any supermarket or general merchandise store will suffice. Two they selected were Whole Foods, the high-end, high-price organic food chain, and Costco, a warehouse club.

“Whole Foods is actually a psychographic, not a demographic, said Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. “One of the things people say is, ‘You go after an affluent audience.’ But we don’t define our audience by their demographic. We define our audience based on what they think.”

He said that above all else the magazine’s marketing tries to stir intellectual curiosity. But he acknowledged that some will inevitably see The Economist as a status symbol. “For some people it will be a badge, for some it won’t,” he said, adding that the magazine does not intentionally shoot for that image. “If we ever started to market ourselves to be cool, it would fail.”

But it has clearly become a hip product in some circles. Until recently, The Economist could be bought at, of all places, Freemans Sporting Club, a high-end Greenwich Village boutique that sells $189 plaid button-downs and $396 suede boots. Explained the store’s manager, Jesse Johnson, “We started carrying it because we just felt it was relevant to have.” The store stopped carrying it, Mr. Johnson added, because it was not selling as well as he had hoped.

The Economist may be one of the biggest success stories among news magazines in the United States in the last 25 years, but its trajectory has slowed lately. Newsstand sales, an important indicator of a magazine’s success and a big profit center, have been in sharp decline in recent years — falling 27 percent from more than 71,000 in 2008.
And 45 percent of Economist subscribers are customers for six months or less, according to the latest circulation figures.

Among its competitors, however, The Economist is hardly alone in losing customers at the newsstand. Single copy sales of The Week, for example, averaged about 3,800 in 2009 but have dipped well below 2,000 for several weeks this year, according to the most recent figures available.

But managers at The Economist do not seem very concerned. John Micklethwait, the editor, said the magazine’s long-term success and relevance are only getting stronger in a world that is becoming increasingly global.

“It’s much easier to sell a magazine that’s as global as what we do in an era when if you live in Detroit, your life can get changed by something that happens in Delhi,” he said.
As for The Economist’s hip factor, Mr. Micklethwait said it had nothing to do with how the magazine was edited. “Once you start trying to segment and work out what people might want to see, I think that would be a journey to some type of psychological hell.”

In my opinion, the ads put social networking in perspective; after all, networking socially has been happening for years. Sure the Internet, smart phones and iPads make it so much easier (and quicker) to connect these days but is that better? Not always. I still want to see my friends in person, to hug them and I don’t want to feel weird for knowing what they’ve been up to because I looked at their vacation photos on Facebook. I want to hear about the vacation from them…in more than 140 characters.

So, I admit it…while I use social networking and I understand the value for our clients, I’m still a little skeptical. Maybe that’s why the Coleman advertising campaign struck such a cord with me, its saying what I’ve been thinking. But more importantly, it made me take action, I’m already gathering a group of friends for a long over due trip so we can catch up in person, not just online!

You’d think that collaboration would be ‘table stakes’ across the land.  Not so.  That’s why it’s worth a great big shout out to Neil Buckholz, chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute of Aging.

A decade ago, Buckholtz was frustrated about how slow Alzheimer’s research was moving.  Scientists were looking for biomarkers.  And the search was going unbearably slow. 

The problem was that there were so many universities and researchers thoughout the world using different methodologies, which caused them to get different results. 

The creation of a common set of data would require greater resources than were available at any individual research facility.  Buckholtz applied the ‘wiki’ principle and encouraged NIH to get researchers to share their information…and the collaboration has led to the discovery of a seemingly foolproof way to detect Alzheimer’s disease in its earliest stages. 

This historic breakthrough is a vivid reminder of the power of collaboration.

Thanks to these brands no longer existing……. 

……images like this can be seen all across our nation, one of the 1,000+ GM dealerships that now lie vacant.

Here’s a question for you – what do you do with them? Every time I pass one, I can’t help but thinking to myself, “Man, GM has a long-lasting PR problem.”

So here’s my solution. Donate them, every one of ‘em that’s structurally sound, to the YMCA. There’s plenty of room for parking(!), ample space to make athletic courts and fields and the dealership interiors could easily be outfitted for workout facilities, classrooms, you name it.

And maybe even consider creating 1,000 retro signs like these to hang outside every location to celebrate at least one organization that Americans everywhere can still celebrate.

]]> http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/08/18/what-to-do-with-gms-urban-and-suburban-and-rural-blight/feed/ 1 http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/08/16/neuromarketing-mind-reading-marketers-have-ways-of-making-you-buy/ http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/08/16/neuromarketing-mind-reading-marketers-have-ways-of-making-you-buy/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:37:24 +0000 Henry Mathieu http://www.rawlemurdy.com/?p=1083 My sister sent me a fascinating article by Graham Lawton and Clare Wilson, published in New Scientist called, “Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy.” –

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.300-mindreading-marketers-have-ways-of-making-you-buy.html

The article is about Neuromarketing – “a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.”   As a creative who has too often sat behind two-way mirrors and watched my campaigns die silent deaths at the hands of generally well intentioned, but generally inarticulate people haphazardly thrown together into focus groups, learning of a potentially better way to test the efficacy of advertising concepts before they get produced was of great interest to me.

In the article, Thom Noble, the managing director of NeuroFocus Europe claims that, “What people say and what they think [in traditional focus groups] is not always the same.  Conventional research really struggles with this.”  On an intuitive level, I have felt Mr. Nobel’s claim to be agonizingly true time and time again.  Later in the article, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, explains, ‘the problem is that much of the decision-making process happens at a subconscious level, and experiments reveal that people are generally not very good at explaining the thinking behind their choices. “Sometimes they simply don’t know why they chose things,” he says. “They concoct explanations after the fact, or make up explanations that are socially acceptable.”’  Thankfully, more scientific, technologically driven approaches to testing consumer preferences may be emerging.  It’s exciting to conceive of a day where these new neuromarketing research techniques, could enable marketers get around hearing what people think they think, or what people think we want to hear them say, and get directly into what they’re actually thinking.

Regardless of whether or not these neuromarketing techniques become refined enough to be useful and affordable enough to be widely available, there were two clear takeaways in the article that are both worth underscoring.

First, ‘… our decisions are much less rational than traditional economics suggests. “We find that emotions are really important,” says Mirja Hubert, a consumer researcher at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany.  “Even rational decisions are not possible without emotion.”  Emotions are also key to the elusive concept of “brand loyalty” – the often irrational preference for one version of a product over essentially identical competitors.’  If we want to make meaningful connections with our consumers and build lasting relationships over time, it’s more important to make them feel something than it is to ask them to analyze, calculate, and come to a rational conclusion.

And second, ‘According to NeuroFocus’s chief science adviser, neuroscientist Robert T. Knight at the University of California, Berkeley, an EEG trace [one of several technologies discussed in the article] can reveal the three things that market researchers really need to know: “Did you pay attention? Did it elicit emotions? Was it memorable?” If a product doesn’t tick these three boxes then it won’t succeed.’  True that, Robert T. Knight.  Those are the three boxes I try to tick on everything I write.

ladies and gentlemen, behold….the new BP brand makeover:

Oh yeah, bet you forgot that BP swallowed up this former division of Standard Oil in 1998. Maybe you remember gas station signage like this?

Apparently, franchise stations in various parts of the country are considering (wisely!) to drop the BP in favor of Amoco.

Above all else, NASCAR Nation is giggling with glee at the prospect of having a great American brand return to team sponsorship…

]]> http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/08/10/the-new-bp-brand/feed/ 0 http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/30/advertising-helps-people-enjoy-things-more/ http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/30/advertising-helps-people-enjoy-things-more/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:56:37 +0000 Henry Mathieu http://www.rawlemurdy.com/?p=1065 I’ve often had a hard time justifying to myself the fact that I spend so much of my time and energy creating advertising.  Does advertising in and of itself provide any social benefit to anyone, or is it just contributing to the clutter and overall deluge information infiltrating every party of our everyday lives?  A college buddy of mine  suggested I look up this article – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html – which I found very heartening.  As it turns out, advertising can contribute to the pleasure people experience consuming the goods we advertise:

“ [This] research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

‘Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.” ’

-Stephen Shankland quoting a research scientist involved in the research.

I like thinking that if I write a good ad, it could help people enjoy whatever I’m pushing more than they would if they hadn’t seen the ad.

- Article in Full-

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html

January 14, 2008 10:55 AM PST

Stephen Shankland

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This graph shows the activity in the brain’s pleasure center; there’s more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, “You get what you pay for.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science.

]]> http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/30/advertising-helps-people-enjoy-things-more/feed/ 2 http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/27/my-four-square-affair/ http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/27/my-four-square-affair/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:55:24 +0000 kjuday http://www.rawlemurdy.com/2010/07/27/my-four-square-affair/ My affair with Four Square took me by surprise. I’d heard about him. Heck, my friends had all dated him, so he couldn’t be that bad. But did I really want to jump on the bandwagon and be another notch in his interface? Did I want my friends and future children to know every detail of what Four Square and I had done together? That we stayed out a little too late on a ‘school night’ last Tuesday. Or that I really don’t ever cook dinner at home. And what happens when Mom and Dad find out I’m dating Four Square and lecture me about using protection and protecting my assets. Geez…the list goes on.

A glass of wine later and my inhibitions at bay, I flirted my way into his path and told him my name. And oh, the places we went. Our romance was a whirl wind. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him. And there wasn’t a friend (or stranger for that matter) that I met that I couldn’t help showing my new boy toy off to. The more time I spent with him, the better the gifts. He even made me feel like a queen and everyone around me knew it.

So what happened? Why are we on a break? Because there’s something to be said for showing a little leg and keeping it at that. I want a little mystery in my life. It helps keep the romance alive. My life was just too much of an open book with him and I jumped in too quickly. That and he shared TMI about what he’d done with my friends.

So although I haven’t ruled out drunk dialing him late one night, I’m definitely still on the lookout for someone a little more my type.