Experience the Message

Bombay Beautiful

I've arrived in Bombay, aka Mumbai, after a pleasant 32-hour sojourn via London and New Delhi, and although I should be passing out right now, I simply can't. A quick walk around the hotel in this teeming and sultry city has got me juiced.

I'm a good traveler. Rather, I think myself good at adaptation and superficial assimilation with cultures other than my own.

I was born in Russia and emigrated to the US when I was a boy. I've taken courses in London and found myself on a Eurorail train all too often. I did a Peace Corps stint in Chad, Africa for far too long. And between Venezuela, Jamaica, Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay I had that hemisphere covered.

But Bombay has got me spinning. More importantly, it has been extremely welcoming. I'm here to research my next book, and the folks here who are helping me have been extraordinary. I am set to meet with COO Kaushik Mukherji and his team at Hungama. (What an amazing company!) I will also be meeting with Yashesh Shethia at Chlorophyll (again, a top concern). And Bobby Pawar, the head creative at Mudra, has promised me many drinks at his favorite bar. What more can a guy ask for?

The hospitality and warmth and aid that has already been given me is heartwarming. I hope to learn and take in, but more importantly, experience. I know that there is much to learn here. What a chapter in the book this will be.

Off to Mumbai

In order to research my next book, I'm off to Mumbai to learn about marketing and advertising in India. I will be in Mumbai (many still call it Bombay) next Sunday through Wednesday. Not enough time, of course. But I would love to meet up if you're in the area.

BACK FROM THE (EX) USSR

Hi all. I just returned from Moscow, where I was researching a chapter for my next book.

Here's a photo from Arbat Street that I think fairly encapsulates the changes undergone by the Russian people and their marketplace.

Stagecoach Derailed

It is well-known that I have mad love for Adrants. So it's surprising the Adranters have picked on Stagecoach Island. I mean, this is the campaign that practically started the Second Life gold rush. It's obvious that the real-world manifestation which Adrants writes about -- and the co-opting of the concept of virtual worlds -- just doesn't stack up to the original. I guess the Wells Fargo marketers had a fairly straight line of thinking: "Hey, let's lift the Second Life title, give it a silly music angle, and unleash it as a consumer promo!" Yeah? Bad idea. Stagecoach Island is bigger than this. It is better than this. And Adrants knows it.

GRIPING AND GRINNING: REPUTATION NETWORKS START WITH ONE

We all know the power of reputation networks. It is how eBay runs its business. A web of comments for or against a particular vendor drives its sales. Overall, people talking about their experiences with a brand, product or service is how commerce will function. Forget advertising. That's just fluff. The real brand equity is in the reputation networks.

Case in point: this particular study shows that online customer product reviews drive satisfaction and loyalty and provide a competitive advantage for sites that offer them. No duh.

But this is not the reason for this post. I want to share another story. According to this article, a single site run by a man and his octagenarian father in the UK has cost the petro-giant Shell billions of dollars. And it all started with a gripe.

The Donovan website has become an open wound for Shell. The Anglo-Dutch giant has tried to shut it down on the grounds that it uses the company name. However, as www.royaldutchshellplc.com makes no money, this hasn't worked.

"We wanted it to become a magnet for people who had a problem with the company," Donovan told me when I visited him recently. It has. The Ogoni tribe of Nigeria uses the website to spread information about Shell's activities in the Niger delta. And unhappy Shell insiders frequently post on the site's live chat facility.

Another muckraking site is targeting McDonalds. These "gripe sites" are the uber-reputation makers. They may not get millions of people to rate a company from good to bad, but they are repositories of information from those who have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a corporation or an industrial complex. These folks can bring a company down. And it all starts with one person.

BTW, it is estimated that Donavan's actions have cost Shell billions of dollars in lost revenue. His website costs $2/week to run.

BLAM

The posts on these blogs have been pinged so many times by blog spam ("blam?"), I have lost count the times I had to purge them from my inbox. But these two pings to past posts I have decided to approve for publication: Mmm...Mmm...BBQ and Golden Idiots. Here's why: both blams are contextually right -- one of for a range of BBQ grills, the other is for Golden Palace itself. But here's the rub: the title of the Golden Palace post is "Golden Idiots." I disparage the company in that post. I take issue with its stupidity, its vapidness and general Fox-like behavior. So why would the company want to have a Trackback to it's website? There's a quote by someone I don't know that states that "man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid." Unfortunately in Golden Palace's instance, both machine and man are erring on the side of stupidity.

OPEN FORUM

When I receive impassioned and lucid responses to my posts, I tend to take them out of the "comments" links and set them up front-and-center here. So without further ado, here is a response to Product Placement for Pussies from Matthew Glass:

Max,

As the CEO of Grand Central Marketing, the agency that produced both the Meow Mix Café and the Meow Mix House reality show, I’d like to address some of the statements made in your post and Sam Ewen’s subsequent comment. First off, thank you for your kind words about The Meow Mix Cafe in your book and on your blog. In fact it was a success that brought the brand international recognition from the marketing community and made the company's wet food pouches one of the most successful new product launches of the year. While we agree that the Café was a great experience for those customers who visited the cafe, I think you’re shortchanging the Meow Mix House experience. Thousands of people came to see the cats in person, with many returning day after day to visit their favorites. There was constantly a crowd in front of the storefront peering through the window and blocking pedestrian traffic on Madison Avenue—above and beyond the 10,000 consumers who came inside the house.

But the House’s storefront set was only a small part of an integrated campaign that also involved TV programming and most importantly, an online component. Through the Internet we were able to spread the experience internationally and capture the fancy of catlovers worldwide. We received emails from people all over the world telling us how much they loved watching the cats on the live webcams . One woman in the Canary Islands went so far as to start her own chatroom for people to discuss the cats. Many of the participating animal shelters started grassroots campaigns for people to vote for their hometown felines, and more than a quarter of a million consumers voted online for their favorite cats.

With regard to Mr. Ewen’s comment that “We work out of New York and never heard that this happened, so it did not seem to get a huge amount of press either (the real reason they did it I am sure)” — I’m not sure where he gets his news but there were four stories about the house in the New York Post, four in the Daily News and one in the New York Times. The house was also featured on The Today Show, The Early Show, Live with Regis and Kelly, E! News, Inside Edition, Fox and Friends, The Insider, and Fox & Friends, just to name a few.

Thank you, Matthew. I appreciate the effort to reach out. This is why I blog. And hopefully, this is why ETM readers keep coming back. Again, thanks....to you all!!!!

A PERSONAL RANT IN D MINOR

I must apologize for the banality and dryness of the last post. Not the first part of it. I really think that the FutureLab blog is a very good read. Much better than this one, it would seem.

The last post – which I tellingly forgot to title – is total drivel. What the fuck do I care about the difficulty of defining experiential marketing in the business-to-business marketplace? (Again, I must apologize, this time for the profanity).

Sure. I care a little. I have to. I’m a firm believer of experiential marketing, or rather, the idea of delivering life-changing branded experiences to the consumers of the world.

I dig that. I like the way it rolls off the tongue. I hold XM to be something to study, advance, promulgate and analyze. Some would even say I’m an expert on it, if at the very least a pundit. Many may think all this to be a bit of quackery. But allow me to rant a bit nonetheless.

I served up that cold dish of blah because I’m pressed for time, and when marketing bloggers want to post without much thought, we go after statistics.

So, there you have it: an admission. I had nothing to talk about, so I threw out some numbers. I wasn’t inspired enough, so I relied on metrics. I didn’t have time to get deep, so I got wide.

Sound familiar? And I’m writing to the creatives out there now....

Anyone ever find themselves faced with the insurmountable foe to creativity: the guy who wants to talk about numbers instead of ideas?

The brand manager who is more worried than inspired, who is more interested in the job than the brand, who when confronted with a risky proposition folds faster than a lawn chair. Creativity dies when someone asks “how many people will this campaign reach.”

The answer is simple: 1.

One person. That’s all you need. If the idea is great, if the campaign is ground-breaking, if it delights and inspires your consumers, if it changes that way we look at the world and each other, then all you need is one person to see it. For he or she will be your greatest evangelist.

Think about all the great ideas that have shaped our world. It all starts with the creator, and then someone else who believes in the creation. If you can reach one, you can reach a billion. So, how’s that for numbers?

Sorry for the rant. It’s been a while. And it feels good.

CRAIGSLIST GETS IT

From Adpulp:

Wall Street Journal looks at Craigslist, the free classified service now serving 300 U.S. cities.

No one really questions that Craigslist could be bigger -- much, much bigger. The company took in a relatively paltry $25 million or so in revenue last year, while its peers among the Internet's top 10 raked in billions.

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?

According to its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, a company fully focussed on one thing—delivering its brand promise to its customers. "If it's not something that users are asking for," he says, "we don't consider it."

I recently met Craig Newmark (creater and chief customer service rep of Craigslist) at the Corante 2006 Innnovative Marketing Conference, and came away utterly impressed with his humility and his historical understanding of humanity. More precisely, I got the distinct feeling that for all his geekdom, Craig is a man of the people, and an astute judge of human propensity.

Who needs oodles of moolah when you can be a visionary instead? Just because people love his brand now, doesn't mean that they will when Craiglsit becomes just another money-hoarding online venture. I mean, its $25 million to run a list site. That's not bad. Why try to take over the world? Look what's happening to Wikipedia, folks.

BLOGGING FLUFF

On an entirely different note, I am at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference at Columbia University today and tomorrow. There are some great minds here. The host is none other than Bernd Schmitt, renown author and professor here at the university.

He just walked by to ask if I am blogging, and I said yes, adding that I sometimes feel an obligation to blog even though I may not have much to say. Bernd quickly agreed, telling me that only yesterday he posted an entry about Sony on his blog that he really didn't care too much for. But as bloggers, we feel a duty to blog.

He then suggested off-the-cuff that I should blog about our little conversation, which I am doing right now. He is standing next to me. We're laughing. And in this little exchange, I have once again fallen in love with blogging. There is no compulsion to blog. It just comes naturally. And it can be done instantly.

Thanks for reading.