The “Bucks” Ends Here…

One of the core principles of our 5 Laws at Marketing 2.0 Win is the Law of Process = Chaos. What this principle says is in simple terms is that process in the service of strategy is a good thing, however if it is the driver or central organizing principle of a company’s marketing or in this case public face, take care, take very good care.

We can see this playing out on a grande scale right in front of our eyes with coffee giant Starbucks. After an incredible run of phenomenal growth on a global scale, we see the symptoms… declining stock price and unhappy investors clamoring for relief, bringing visionary Howard Schultz back into the CEO role at the company. His self proclaimed goal… to help the company get back to its core… the coffee/community experience that in today’s Starbucks’ corporatized environment seems lost.

How? Howard himself gave us a couple of examples… of this disconnection: fresh-locked packaging, where you can’t smell the product anymore. And “goof proof” espresso machines. Machines that make it simple and fast to “build” a specialty drink, while put a wall between the customer and barrista and taking the artistry out of the drink making process.

I agree with that these are customer disconnects. But do they disconnect with the brand that Starbucks is?, enough so, so as to flatten sales in existing stores, like we have seen with Wal Mart, Dell and others?

In this case I am going to argue the answer is NO. The issue is not a brand conflict here.

Yes, these changes matter to some degree… but they are fixable and incremental issues, touch points that need to be aligned, indeed, but not a commodity-busting strategy that they really need to fix the problem.

You can see this in action in the Got a Great Idea/Tell Us, community function that now is front and center on their web site. I love the concept. Surrender control and open up the floor for your customers to offer their insights and then respond back, with action.

Some popular customer generated ideas… Free WiFi, a Loyalty card (buy 10/get one free) and others are incremental ideas… and sound hardly new or radical. My advice… implement them. However, don’t expect they will turn the tide.

The real issue is that the Starbucks concept is now approaching the mature phase of the product lifecycle, as these ideas so clearly demonstrate. The reality is that the Starbuck’s concept is now a commodity, which in fact the company with its “goof proof” drink making process helped bring about. This means that price, lower price and greater non-differentiated competition are the business drivers.

Look at it this way. MacDonald’s is now rolling out espresso/specialty drinks. Dunkin Donuts, one of the big winners in the Starbuck’s phenomenon, has been offering these lower cost specialty drinks for the past couple of years. Soon enough it seems every fast food chain will offer them. So now what?

Let’s take a closer look at Dunkin Donuts, because here is where the solution lay. At the outset, I admit it, I am a Starbuck’s regular. It is not my favorite, but with locations it seems at every corner nationwide, Starbucks delivers a consistent and premium product that meets my expectations almost every time.

Last week I offered to make the office coffee run, and one of my colleagues ordered not a Starbuck’s but a Dunkin Donuts coffee, medium vanilla. It was then that my mind was blown.

We know that Dunkin is not a premium coffee but a more everyday product, a blend I am told of Arabica and other less expensive coffees. It is a lower wholesale cost, more generic product. But when I saw the price for the cup at Dunkin which was $1.79 or in essence $.10 less that a similar size Starbuck’s, I was floored… generic product at a premium price! The folks at Dunkin must be smiling all the way to the bank! Thank you Starbuck’s!!!

So Starbuck’s is in an interesting position… its premium product is being attacked by generic products and commoditized… forced to concede on price or lose customers, because as we know, you can get a specialty drink anywhere… for less!

What is Starbucks to do?

Howard Schultz, if you read this… incremental, process-oriented activities focused on your existing customers are good but in fact cannibalizing, because these kinds of activities are pulling revenues from your existing audience. I will argue that the way forward in this case is to reposition Starbucks and counterattack to build market share.

In other words, Loyalty is important, but it comes at a cost and won’t drive growth. Look at it this way, “free WiFi” and “buy 10 get one free” are tactics and I will argue not nearly enough. Nor is “watch the barrista” or “smell the coffee.” Although appropriate, these tactics do not a growth strategy make.

Just as Dunkin and others offer what we can argue is an inferior product at a better price thanks to you, Starbucks now needs to execute a jujitsu strategy and show consumers in simple and clear terms the added value of their premium product over the competition. This is a classic re-positioning strategy.

So… ladies and gentlemen, the drum roll please… time for the Pepsi… ooops, the Starbuck’s challenge. Put your product up against the competition in “blind” tastings and build a campaign around it… Wow! This really is better!

As it stands, an espresso is an espresso is an espresso, and it will stay that way until Starbucks does something about it. That time, I will argue, especially if I was an investor and I am not, is NOW. And by doing so, the company can carve out MacD’s and Dunkin customers who in fact are ready to appreciate the difference premium makes. The key is to connect the dots positioning wise and make it clear to them what this difference is where the rubber meets the road, and for Starbucks that is in what is a better tasting cup of coffee every time.

Are Ad Words Dead?

We have seen the headlines over the past few months… “signs of click recession!” or “decelerating clicks!” Obviously these are referencing Google and are referring to ComScore’s recent monthly data reports showing decline in the number of times consumers clicked pay per click ads that accompany Google search results.

We can infer from the headlines that journalists and the powers that be may attribute this to environmental factors as a result of a slowing economy. Others say this is the result of a conscious effort by the company to trim clicks so that they can limit the supply and charge more.

We can go back and forth about the cause, but it clearly appears that advertisers, after years of consistent and meteoric growth, may be getting fewer sales per click, which is bad news indeed for all concerned.

Marketing 2.0 Win has its own theory, borne out of let me say up front non-scientific research in my work as an adjunct professor of marketing at Emerson College in Boston. I see it in the classroom all the time, the search-based PPC ad platform is becoming mature and students (vis a vis consumers) aren’t noticing or responding to them as they have before.

Remember Banner Ads? Or Flash-based web site intro’s? How cool they seemed… then, and how they don’t now?

Thus is it may be with search-based adwords. When we first encountered them, they raised the bar for relevant ads, based on what we were searching for at the current moment. Google not only delivered us better search results than the others, the search based ads as often as naught mirrored our interest at that instant and offered us the potential to find best price for products we may be seeking. We were interested, we noticed, we clicked through and we bought, finally making the long sought after promise of the web to deliver relevance to individuals a reality.

No, don’t me wrong, Google is not resting on any laurels. They are a great innovating company and their acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick prove this. However, YouTube even with huge numbers of visitors is still hard to monetize, and the DoubleClick approach to knowing where you have been, as well as where you are in order to make better inferences leading to more relevant ads, well this opens up a whole Pandora’s Box of issues from privacy to trust that will only get more intense and slow things down.

In our world view, if relevance is king then as the Law of Surrender = Victory dictates, control is key… customer control. To make it simple, ask the customer what they want. Offer them a way to choose from a menu of ads or create a profile that can be changed at any time, which can then help serve up ads on search, on You tube, Hulu or wherever, that will be more relevant. For example, when is a car ad most relevant? Probably when you are in the market. Give customers the ability to declare their interest.

By doing this two things happen. 1. With the customers help and control, ads will be more relevant and targeted, and 2. The more opportunities the customer has to raise their hands, the more likely a prospect they will be, which will translate into higher conversions and sales.

So, has search-based advertising had its day? You be the judge. However from where we sit there is no doubt that the novelty may be wearing off and that the quest for relevance is ongoing. In Marketing 2.0 Win, it is certain that if companies do more to bring customers into the mix, relevance will follow, which in the end creates even more opportunities for growth.

Radiohead Surrenders Control and Makes a Bold Move

The big news on the music marketing front this week has to be the upcoming release of Radiohead’s 7th album “In Rainbows.” The reason is simple… the extremely popular band is no longer affiliated with a major label and releasing the music direct to the public themselves… no label, no itunes. This alone is fairly radical. Some great artists have been unaffiliated with a label and releasing product for years quite successfully.

 

One example that comes to mind is one of the most successful jazz artists today, composer Maria Schneider and her constantly touring “big band”. She is a part of a cooperative record label called Artists Share and is able to offer her fans a variety of levels of participation with her recording projects… from simple album purchase to tiered access to the project’s creative process all the way to Executive Producer level for higher financial contributions… audience choice. She has been so successful with this that not only has she been able to take on and fund ever more ambitious projects, she even received the first ever Grammy for a pure digital album.

 

And others such as Prince who take the long view of their business have distributed their latest recordings for free, in his case as in insert in a newspaper or at concert events.

 

Radiohead is taking this thing to new level because customers are invited to pay what they wish for a download version of upcoming album…directly from them!

 

If you follow Marketing 2.0 Win you know that one of our 5 laws of marketing for the 21st century is “Surrender = Victory.” In essence what this law indicates is that in our topsy turvey world, like it or not customers have control and the more we as marketers are willing to surrender control to them, the more successful we will be.

 

Radiohead is doing just this…surrendering maximum control. We can argue that they can afford to, especially when you consider that they are one of the world’s most popular bands with a huge fan base and they have in effect disintermediated most of the middle men in the process. But the inverse is also true, one could also argue they have the most to lose.

 

One outstanding question what will fans do?

• My sense is that some will choose to pay nothing… which is totally acceptable.
• Many will base their choice based on the digital retail price which, depending on how you look at it is 9.99 on iTunes and 8.99 on the new Amazon MP3 service.
• And assuming people like the new album, many will probably pay more based on its emotional value.

This “feeling” will also be driven by the fact that fans will be dealing with the band directly and my guess is this will be perceived as a righteous act, worthy of support.

 

This is all good, but there is one more factor in the mix of this bold act that excites me the most. We know that iTunes has been the most successful legal distribution channel with 3+ billion tunes downloaded. This represents a tiny fraction of music that is downloaded… for free every day however.

 

This what some would call “underground audience” is in the hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide. They have contempt for licensed content and labels and believe it is their right to get the music they want for free. Like it or not, they feel entitled to it.

 

By surrendering control, I figure Radiohead is making the first real and legitimate move to capture some of this audience. If they can pay whatever price they wish, I will guess many will. The only question then is how much? No matter what, Radiohead wins… consumers win… and a whole new way to engage the largest possible audience may emerge… an audience that is empowered to dictate their own terms in the transaction. Welcome 2.0 a new day!