Buddhist Marketer

Make That Two (2)

One of the characters in the film Waking Life declares that you become a new person every seven years.  By my maff I’m thinking that number is way lower.  From an email I wrote four years ago to my best friend, re-capping a springtime brunch I’d attended at the home of a mutual acquaintance:

Click-clacking through her luxury marble lobby, I had to remind myself that this was not the life I wanted, that I never wanted to live in a high-rise with a god damned fountain out front, that I didn’t want an apartment on the 38th floor with parquet floors and a teak dining room table, that I wouldn’t trade in my rich and interesting if not complicated and occasionally painful existence to be this bland girl with a McKinsey husband, Princeton degree, and tendency to vote Republican.

Does the second-guessing ever stop? Do I get older, grow more comfortable in my skin, become more assured in my choices? Or will I continue to run a what if scenario on my brain? Everything in my being tells me that a bearskin rug at the foot of a sleigh bed is the most obnoxious thing on the planet, but fuck if I didn’t walk out slightly rattled. ARGH.

Gee whiz, li’l Ms. Judgy.  What’s with the drama-rama, “occasionally painful” … ?  Oy vey.

Also, I totally want a marble-floored lobby, a high-rise apartment, a teak dining room table, and a bearskin rug at the foot of my sleigh bed.

Yanni McYawnerson, PhD

Recently, I’ve been jotting my to-do list down in a little notebook I purchased in Paris a few years ago.  Apparently, this was my notebook of choice for jotting down the questions that I’d wanted to explore in a doctoral program.  Good thing the various committees can spot an easily-bored mind from a mile away; sure, I’d like to read a paper that explores any of these questions, and probably I’d like to heckle someone delivering a lecture on these topics, but I sure as heck don’t want to be the one having to slave away and do the research myself.

Isn’t, like, primary work what right-shoring is for?

So, here are the topics that I am officially delegating to the universe of academic types.  I sure as heck ain’t gonna do it :)

• As t –> infinity, humans in society –> ?
• How have Marx‘ theories been borne out over time?
• Is there an ethos / value structure undergirding databases?  If so, what, & how?
• How have representations of self changed with the internet - and how have these influenced definitions of self?
• Marcuse, post internet?
• Why do we do what we do in an online environment — disappearance of third space — suburbanization
• What implications does the why of the internet have for public policy?
• What spaces need to exist online to better serve the public good?
• What social service needs once met via 3rd space are no longer & can be addressed using the internet?
• Prove the loss of info from walking around & its negative impacts
• What are the assumptions that underlie my proposed solutions (notes on education) (what am I assuming) (can I prove it)
• Has the internet been good or bad for society?  (How do we determine - )
• Should we be cavepeople?
• How should society arrange itself from a public $ gov’t standpoint given the internet
• Does the ethical framework that gave rise to democracy assume a non-internet universe?
• How should society be arranged given —

If you see a journal article out there that explores any of these topics, holler.

And if you’re giving a lecture on any of the above and need a heckler, you know who to call.

Open Source Budget Deficit Fixes

Two of my friends have recently posted ideas regarding how to fix various revenue shortfalls:

• Medical doctor wants to add pit stops to excess lawn action flanking California highways (his example is gas stations; I think electric car charging stations might be the way to go)
• Yale grad wants to outlaw filibusters and mandate that all legislative disagreements be resolved by steel cage matches broadcast on pay-per-view

Snip from the former:

We could generate a substantial amount of revenue, beautify local communities, decrease pedestrian exposure to pollutants, improve local traffic patterns, and increase efficiency of the freeway system by reducing overall transit times for drivers by reducing time spent waiting in congested and often complicated highway offramp business communities.

and the latter:

This could also go a long way in solving our budget deficit - can you imagine the pay-per-view revenues that would be created by a Korean Parliament style showdown over Universal Health care? People would be jumping off of the gallery, swinging from chandeliers - instead of filibusters there would be steel cage matches.

C-SPANdex, anyone?

Have you spotted any creative idears for fixin’ deficits?

Smells Like Marketing

From Faye Penn’s “making SCENTS” in the InStyle MAKEOVER 2009:

… parfumeurs often resort to elaborate back stories to sell their fragrances.  Consider the promotional text accompanying three fall launches.

There’s YSL’s woodsy, floral Parisienne, a new fragrance whose bottle has “vibrating facets evoking Paris, city of light, city of lust, the labyrinth of streets in which you can lose yourself.”

Then there’s Marc Jacobs’s spice-infused Lola, whose muse is “sexy, with a fun, flirtatious wink.  Coquettish and a bit provocative … Playfully alluring and irresistibly tempting.”

And what about My Glow, the baby-soft new whiff from Jennifer Lopez, for whom “now is the most perfect moment in her life.  Poised between pride in the past and promise for the future, she feels fulfilled as never before.  Her spirit is soothed with serenity, her heart overflowing with tenderness.  There is no deeper love, no greater happiness than this.  No words can describe it, but a fragrance can capture it.”

Of course, the author’s queries to an informally-assembled panel of ten men at a Manhattan bar during happy hour regarding how they’d describe each of the fragrances above resulted in zero consensus regarding what each of the scents conjured; Lola conjured thoughts ranging from “very conservative” to “cougar.”

The complexity of marketing a product like fragrance is a function of the complexity of consumer’s noses — the memories of our olfactory receptors are much more unique than visual memory, which does not experience much variation from Amurrican to Amurrican.  Our image-heavy media-drenched culture is relatively homogenous as far as eyeball stimulation goes, whereas I guarantee you that the scent of your mom’s home-cookin’ and the things you smelled breezing along the highway on a summer afternoon were markedly different from what my nose was exposed to.  (Rice; cow shit; mint farms.)

Which makes me wonder:  does this mean that finding a smart marketer is all the more important when the product you’re peddling is a fragrance? Or — given that the “story” is so profoundly arbitrary — can you simply select some random writer and call it a day?

My write-up of Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb on Amazon has been found useful by 90% of the people who bothered to rate it:

I love Flowerbomb. Wearing it, I feel strong, powerful, sexy, and incredibly woman. It’s the scent version of gorgeous 4″ heels, great legs, and a “I know who I am, and I like it” swagger.

Yeah, okay, whatever that means.

Crunch Lafayette Monday 4p Yoga Sculpt

After yoga class
Beneath the basement steam room
The six train grumbles

Wyndham Puts On Pants; Heads To Yale

From Chris Crowell’s “Wyndham clarifies brand direction” in the July 2009 issue of Hotel & Motel Management:

“Our brands, to some degree, are adopted,” said Jeff Wagoner, president of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts.  “So, you take our brands, put the proper clothes on them, educate them appropriately and you end up with clarity — something that makes sense for the future.”

Eric Danziger, President and CEO of Wyndham Hotel Group has tri-furcated their brands as follows:

1. Reinvigorate Ramada Worldwide, Howard Johnson, and Travelodge
2. Optimize (”Get them to their full operating potential”) Days Inn, Super 8 and Knights Inn
3. Grow Microtel Inns & Suites, Baymont Inns & Suites, and the Wyndham brand family

What advice would you give Wagoner and Danziger?

Get A Headshot, You Hippie

Or, Why You Need To Get Your Butt Onto LinkedIn

Referrals are incredibly important to any business owner, but the number of referrals you can get is limited by:

• The size of your personal network (”Adam”)
• The size of “Adam”’s personal network (”Eve”)
• The ease with which “Adam” can refer you to “Eve”

It’s much easier to make referral-network-bunnies if you:

• Make sure your Facebook profile contains at least a smidgen of information regarding your professional life. A link to your company website will suffice, as will a link to your LinkedIn profile (where you’re allowed to be un-apologetically schmoozy). Your friends can’t refer you if they don’t know what it is that you do and/or what service you provide.
• Make sure that you have a LinkedIn profile. It’s the place where you (or the person who manages your profile) can be unabashedly self-promotional. Look at me! Look at my trophies! Look how deftly I utilize complex grammatical constructions!
• Put your mug on your LinkedIn profile. We are humans which means we have inner cave-people that mostly want to look at eyeballs. Get a good professional-looking headshot and put that thing up there. And make sure it’s brand-consistent; if your clients need someone trustworthy and serious, then leave the clown nose and thong-undies-on-your-head off the profile.

Collectively, these steps remind the friends — who know you as the guy who can shotgun a beer in record time — that you’re also a recommended and competent accountant. This way, when any of your friends gets asked the question, “Hey, do you know an accountant?”, you’ll be top-of-mind — and it’ll be easy for “Adam” to give “Eve” a link to your website and/or your LinkedIn profile.

Sure, maybe you’re not a social network nerd, but at least one your friends (*ahem*) is — and with your good-lookin’ mug smilin’ out from a well-considered LinkedIn profile, you’ve made the ability to drive referral traffic your way that much easier.

Can I Ax You

From a comment on a blog post written by a literary agent who was haunted by a response to a rejection letter she sent an aspiring author:

Kafka once wrote in a letter to a friend: “The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

Yes.

Me wonders:  does the non-tactile experience of reading a non-book (”Books are like vessels; spaces,” said Stephen Carter at a lecture I attended during my reunion) impact the axing ability?

In Defense Of Skewering Mediocre Marketing

I apologize to Matthew Rose for his short-lived tenure on the leaderboard, but there’s a new favorite person in town:  Dustin Curtis — who was born in 1987!! — who writes:

The solution to the enterprise quality problem is easy: foster a culture that doesn’t allow the company to make, produce, sell, or accept shit. Done. Well, it’s not quite that easy. But Steve Jobs is notorious for saying “this is shit” to shitty things, and that bluntness, I think, is essential to a culture that creates amazing products and experiences.

Um, hello, Preacher, says this member of your choir.  From my earlier post “For Condescension“:

But if we’re going to

• Elevate the level of discourse about marketing
• Discourage a culture of conformity within the world of generally-unrepentant capitalists
• Minimize the incentive to simply nod our heads and do what our boss or policy dictates simply because it pays the mortgage

then suit-wearing punks like myself practically have a moral obligation to audibly slap their foreheads when a marketer engages in the mediocre.

I mean, if I sat here and simply accepted a continuous stream of poorly designed emails and abhorrently executed social media campaigns, wouldn’t my silence practically make me an accomplice? (Cue Zizek.)

Benevolent evil-doing on marketing’s landscape is evil-doing just the same. It’s an assault on excellence. I can’t take it. I won’t stomach it. It gives me hives.

I’m glad these kids today have at least one member of their ranks that’s happy to raise a fist to the limp.

For God!  For Country!  For Yale!

Oh wait, wrong context.  I mean, um,  go team!  Go Dustin 1987!

Social Awkwardness Begets UX Expert Status

I obsess about many things, but especially, I obsess about user experience.  I don’t mean in the information architect kind of way — although that, too, is a common thought topic of mine — but rather in the “How Are Humans Experiencing The Universe And How Can I Tailor My Behavior To Encourage Them To Do What I Want Them To” sort of way.

Example:  If I need to encourage a hairdresser to read an article about how to sell salon services to men, what’s the optimal way to do so?  Where, in the hairdresser’s experience of a website, should I place this contextual cross-sell?  What language should I use to do so?

Example:  If I want to make sure that only prospective graduate shool applicants who are serious about heading back to graduate school click on my paid search ad for master’s programs in anthropology, which keywords should I buy?  Do I want the top listing, or is third from the top okay?  What should the copy in the ad read?  Is there anything I can do, copy-wise, to ensure “self-selection” — so that people who aren’t likely to request graduate school program information will be deterred from blowing my click investment?  What page should I bring the clicker to in order to maximize info requests?

Example:  If I’m hosting a networking event, what information do I need to provide to prospective attendees who’ve never attended this kind of event?  When do I need to provide it?  And how?

I like these kinds of problems because they are not unlike the problems I’ve had to solve the majority of my life.

Example:  If I want these kids to stop telling me that I will burn in hell if I don’t accept the JC as my personal saviour, what should I do, and when?  Do I interrupt them mid-rant, or do I tell a joke afterwards?  Should I pick my nose and/or invoke physical humour in order to maximize distraction from their proselytizing?

I have a suspicion that the people who are really good at designing user experiences are also a bit socially awkward (or have been at one point in their life).  Those who have never had to analyze their fellow humans clinically may have a natural instinct for how humans behave, and how they should interact with them.  Not so the island of misfit toys; we socially awkward types have had to monitor humans, figure out what makes them tick, and then architect our own behaviors in response to their needs.

This kind of clinical approach to human interactions is a skill that lends itself perfectly to UX.

I mean, do you really think that the kind of person that conducts experiments with twitter clicks was the popular kid in middle school?

(That, by the way, is high praise…)