Category: Marketing Trends/News

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Branding, Business Ethics, Democracy, Entrepreneurship, Ethics in Government, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Donald Trump and the late Muhammad Ali had at least three things in common: personal wealth, a love of bragging and a willingness to speak their mind even if others were offended. But there’s a big difference: Ali actually had something to brag about. He really was the greatest at what he did, racking up an amazing 55 victories over 61 fights in his career, and going undefeated in his first 30 bouts.

Muhammad Ai probably wore gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
Muhammad Ai probably wore boxing gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.

He was also a man of deep principle, foregoing his career for three years after refusing to fight in Vietnam.

This is what he said about that choice:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Agree or disagree with him , you knew where he stood.

Ali was also a humanitarian and philanthropist, using his fortune—a fortune amassed not through inherited wealth and speculative business ventures, but by coming up out of poverty and putting himself in the ring to be slugged again and again by some of the strongest people in the world—for social good.

By contrast, Trump brags about screwing people over, is very quick to unleash insults on others, and yet is very thin-skinned when anyone criticizes him. He even revoked the Washington Post’s media credentials to cover the Trump campaign because he didn’t like the things he said about them.

Let’s listen to Trump in his own words:

“The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” –Donald Trump

Of course, it helps that he inherited a fortune from his father, a large-scale NYC landlord whose racist policies were so bad that Woody Guthrie (his tenant, briefly) wrote scathing songs about him. Trump’s own record includes lots of failure—including four bankruptcies. It’s hard to imagine him getting rich if he hadn’t had the springboard of his father’s wealth. And he brags about using bankruptcy as a tool to screw the public to further his personal fortune. This quote is on the same 2011 ABC news report on the bankruptcies:

I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.

Two more very telling quotes from The Donald:

“If you can’t get rich dealing with politicians, there’s something wrong with you.”

“I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for two years, and then I didn’t let him use the land. That’s what we should be doing. I don’t want to use the word ‘screwed’, but I screwed him.”–Donald Trump

Has he reformed? No. Just look at the recent flurry of news stories quoting everyone from the conservative National Review to the New York State Attorney General calling his Trump University “a scam.”

Results for search for "trump university scam" from Washington Post, CNN, Wikipedia, and National Review
Results for search for “trump university scam” from Washington Post, CNN, Wikipedia, and National Review

This is the continuation of a long history of unethical business dealings, as this story in US News and World Report notes.

As it happens, I’ve heard both Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump speak in person—Ali at an Aretha Franklin concert in Harlem, in 1971, and Trump delivering the keynote for a conference where I was also speaking, in 2004. Ali’s speech left me feeling empowered. Trump’s left me feeling I’d been slimed by an exhibitionist in a public place.

This bullying, thin-skinned, name-calling racist and sexist who brags about how he gets rich on the backs of others has no grasp of the issues, and apparently no ethics. He  doesn’t belong in the White House.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

In one day, I had two interactions with people reaching out on behalf of their employer that made me scratch my head.

I got telemarketed by a woman who claimed to have sent me some stuff I never received. She didn’t understand the simplest questions like “was it by postal or email?” (answer, repeated 3x: “Mail”) “What domain was it coming from?”

To top it off, the follow-up email, or what I believe was the follow-up email, came from a different domain and was signed by a different person, but it mentioned a conversation with their office.

And then there was the person who private-messaged me on Facebook about her social media marketing services. When I clicked the link, I was appalled at the sloppy grammar–NOT a way to get me to do business. When I told her that careful writing matters to me and that I wouldn’t be doing business, she started asking whether I would scout for her as an affiliate.

Who vets these people? If you have people representing your company, they should leave a GOOD impression with prospects. Yet over and over, I see businesses being harmed by the clueless, aggressive, unhelpful people they hire.

Gotta wonder.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’d hazard a guess that most US natives between the ages of 40-80 can still sing the jingle: “Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize. That’s what you get with Cracker Jack.” It was a big part of our childhoods, back in the days when three TV networks controlled the entire universe of video and national advertisers bought saturation advertising programs that aired the same commercial many times a day. Cracker Jack was immortalized in the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in 1908, started bundling the prize way back in 1912, and began its national TV advertising in 1955.

The Cracker Jack box as it appeared during my 1960s childhood (courtesy of Wikipedia)
The Cracker Jack box as it appeared during my 1960s childhood (courtesy of Wikipedia)

It didn’t matter that the prize was something worth about 2 cents, something not even worthy of being called a tchochke. It was the thrill of the hunt, searching through all that icky sticky stuff to locate the prize—and the thrill of mystery, never knowing what, umm, “treasure” you’d find. Sometimes it would be something really cool, like a spy decoder ring. But like any other grab-bag item, sometimes it was truly worthless. I knew kids who bought CrackerJack just to get that prize.

At that time, the company was owned by Borden, whose Elsie the Cow was another advertising icon of the period. It’s now owned by Pepsico’s Frito-Lay division

Well, here’s some shocking news: Despite its wildly successful run of more than 100 years, the Cracker Jack toy is now an endangered species. As Bob Dylan sang during the Cracker Jack saturation TV period, “The times, they are a changing.” Cracker Jack is replacing the “tchochkette” (if I can coin a word that merges Yiddish and French) with a slip of paper bearing a QR code!

I’m sorry, but that is just not the same. From a branding point of view, I think it’s a huge error. Cracker Jack’s whole brand is built around nostalgia, Americana, baseball, and that unforgettable jingle. Sure, digital natives will redeem their QR codes and not think twice about it. But they won’t know what they’re missing. And those who can’t afford or choose not to use smartphones are left out entirely. Plus, their kids will never hear their parents scream at a bad driver, “Did you get your license in a Cracker Jack box?” A piece of American culture is disappearing.

In Cracker Jack’s earliest days, during a baseball corruption scandal known as the Chicago Black Sox scandal, a fan reportedly went up to the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson and begged, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” Maybe now, we need to say, “Get back on the track, Jack!”

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics-International, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The US presidential race is full of outsiders this year. Trump gets lots of attention in the media–but Sanders seems to be having more of an impact on policy questions, and on bringing disenfranchised-feeling voters in from outside the electoral process.

There are many parallels between Sanders on the left and Trump on the right–both of them attracting attention for being firmly OUTSIDE the mainstream, and both waging far more successful campaigns than the pundits predicted. And they both look and sound like the New Yorkers they are.

But in many other ways other ways, of course, they’re completely different: Unlike Trump, Sanders is…

1. Seriously concerned about making things better for those who are not wealthy, and basing this on a 50-year record of activism (vs. concern only about making things better for Trump and a few others of enormous class privilege).
2. Thoughtful, willing to engage on issues, analyzes more deeply than most candidates with charisma.
3. A populist fundraising champion who does not fund his campaign with–and thus is not beholden to–corporate money or party money, but from millions of ordinary people. I don’t think this has been done before on this scale (vs. Trump self-funding out of his personal fortune and claiming that this makes him honest because he’s the one doing the buying of politicians instead of being bought by them)
4. Someone who tells the truth (Trump has been caught in more lies than any of the others).
5. A successful coalition builder who has a track record of working well with people who think differently

But even Cruz and Rubio (and certainly dropouts Carson and Fiorina) are outliers too. It is scary to see the Republican Party start to coalesce around the very scary Ted Cruz, who only looks rational because Trump is so far in right field that he moves the public perception of what’s mainstream. When Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (a slasher of the safety net) is considered a centrist, we have a serious distortion in perception vs. reality.

So the big lesson I take away is this: when four out of the five most popular candidates this year are outside the mainstream, the mainstream had better look at why, and what they can do about it. With the exception of Clinton, all the mainstream candidates are out of the race–even presumptive GOP nominee (as of last summer) Jeb Bush.

Me? I agree with at least 80% of what Sanders says, and was happy to vote for him in our March 1 Massachusetts primary.

Oh yes, and let’s not forget the role of the media in king/queen making and unmaking. One of Sanders’ other strengths is in engaging millennials who are good at creating their OWN (social) media–while defeating the myth that a self-declared socialist can’t run a serious campaign for national office in the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Democracy, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
Top of a special Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice cream
Top of a Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice cream
Farther down the page, showing the whole container
Farther down the page, showing the whole container

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you already know I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. And if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m both a long-time student of marketing and a long-time advocate of marketing with honesty and integrity.

In light of this, I received a mailing from one of the groups allied with the Sanders campaign, and immediately noticed some things I wanted to share.

  • The product is totally in keeping with Bernie’s message, talking about the “1%” chocolate layer on top of the ice cream
  • The video featuring Ben Cohen explaining the flavor to Jerry Greenfield, is hilarious, especially where he talks about breaking through the one percent barrier to spread the wealth (the chocolate) throughout the pint
  • Most marketers, when faced with the opportunity to offer a single unique item, set a stratospheric price—but even with a total production run of just fifty, and only one being given to this organization, the price is only $50 (once again reinforcing the brand messaging)
  • However, it’s something of a lottery; only one person gets the prize, but anyone who contributes $50 or more by the deadline gets to play
  • There are also a number of less exclusive rewards—democratizing the lottery somewhat.

If you’d like to see the other prizes, or make a donation and enter the raffle (deadline is tomorrow), visit https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/wewantbernie

Disclaimer and disclosures: I am not involved in any way with organizing this promotion and don’t benefit financially. I have given money to the Sanders campaign and I’ve probably also given money to Progressive Democrats of America, the sponsoring organization.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business Ethics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

A friend of mine, a very successful author and marketer, a deep student of the human psyche, asked on Facebook, “Why do you love/hate Trump? (Disclaimer: I’m indifferent.)”

It was the disclaimer that got me worried. This is part of my response to him:

I have enormous respect for your analytical skills, M.______, but I question deeply your indifference…

M.______, I hope you’re pulling our legs. You of all people understand human motivations and psychology. Trump is a master marketer and manipulator. I don’t know if he’s studied NLP [Neurolinguistic Programming] (or maybe you) or if he’s actually a natural.

I do know that if he wins, I will be looking seriously at what other country I might live in for the next 4 to 8 years. I have family who died in Nazi concentration camps. I don’t want to be part of an America where ordinary citizens are rounded up because they’re Muslim or Mexican, just as my parents’ cousins were for being Jewish.

I don’t say this lightly. I consider him extremely dangerous, and it scares me that enough people in the US take him seriously enough that he’s doing well in the polls (we’ll see if this translates to actual votes).

 Some things I didn’t say to my friend:
In the courtyard of the new Reich Chancellery, the Fuhrer partakes of the "one-pot" communal stew meal in the company of invited fellow citizens. Photo by Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy New York Public Library
In the courtyard of the new Reich Chancellery, the Fuhrer partakes of the “one-pot” communal stew meal in the company of invited fellow citizens. Photo by Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy New York Public Library
 But my deep message to my friend is that we cannot afford indifference. Let’s remember that Hitler was democratically elected, and that Berlin in the 20s was a liberal, arts-centered city. We must not get complacent. We must not think “it can’t happen here.” And we must not be swallowed by indifference.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , ,
Delegates at an international meeting
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)

After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.

Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.

Why? Because:

  1. We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
  2. The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
  3. The business community has woken up. Often a force for conservatism, the business world now understands the catastrophic consequences of failure to make meaningful progress on climate change—and the profits to be made in doing the right thing. If the government won’t act, they will force action through other channels. The emergence of environmental activism among evangelical Christians and even a subset of Tea Party activists who care deeply about the environment is also very encouraging.
  4. The growing use of carbon markets provides additional financial incentives for cutting carbon.
  5. New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
  6. Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.

I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Branding, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Innovation, language, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,
Screenshot of KPMG's internal "higher purpose" video captioned "We Shape History"
Screenshot of KPMG’s internal “higher purpose” video

This Harvard Business Review article and accompanying video are too good not to share. The video is less than two minutes and well-worth watching. Watch it with your marketer hat on. Pay attention both to the direct message and to the outcomes.

KPMG is positioning itself as an agent of social change, a social entrepreneurship giant involved in everything from keeping the Nazis at bay during World War II to certifying the election results that allowed Nelson Mandela to become the first president of a free South Africa.

I’m not passing judgment on the accuracy of the claim that the wonderful, world-changing projects highlighted in the video represent KPMG’s (and predecessor Peat Marwick’s) overall corporate culture  over many decades. I haven’t done the due diligence on that, and frankly, I’m pretty skeptical of the claim. Big Four accounting firms don’t tend to be known as cauldrons of world-changing social entrepreneurship.

But clearly, the company decided to spotlight its role as a changemaker and to foster an employee culture of empowered action—and that’s terrific. Not at all surprised to see the excellent results. Every manager should look at the amazing engagement this campaign created, with over 42,000 stories submitted by employees and 76 percent agreement that their jobs had deeper meaning.

Be sure to note the graph at the bottom, contrasting several employee satisfaction metrics under managers who emphasized or didn’t emphasize a higher purpose.

If one of the largest accounting firms in the world can take this on, your probably much simpler business can do it too. Every person who supervises others should take that data to heart and make sharing their own organization’s higher purpose a consistent part of their own employee motivation (if you get stuck on this, contact me; I can help).

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, propaganda Tagged with , , , , ,
Old Movie Camera: How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today's?
How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today’s?

When I’m in airports, fitness centers, and other places that force-feed TV news, I’m always astonished that anyone takes it seriously. Even in the 60s when they had real news staffs, it was so superficial. I read somewhere that an entire 1-hour newscast transcript would only fill a couple of columns on a page of the NY Times.

These days, it’s far worse than “if it bleeds, it leads.” Murder, mayhem, celebrity gossip, and an astonishingly small amount of actual news, and even less serious analysis. And those are the serious networks. Add in a serious case of propaganda and distortion and you can’t be surprised at how little most Americans understand their world, if they accept what’s fed to them by the medium they’ve chosen to “consume” the news.

Of course, the good news is that anyone who wants to educate themselves now has unlimited choices from around the world. My favorite newspaper these days is London’s The Guardian. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual paper copy.

In the 1980s, I used to subscribe to a magazine called World Press Review, which featured reportage on the same story from 8 or 10 different papers around the world; it was like a one-stop course in media literacy and the nature of 1) matching message to audience, and 2) shaping the audience through the message. Since I made (and continue to make) my career as a marketer and a journalist, these were crucial lessons.

However, it was a monthly, and the stories were at least three months old by the time they got to my mailbox. Of course, technology has passed it by now, and I don’t miss it; we can easily get the same effect by viewing the same story on NPR, Fox News, Al Jazeera-English, the New York Times, Paris Match (which Google will even translate for you, sort of), and your local newspaper.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, propaganda, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

This may be a new level of stupidity. Murdoch-owned publishing behomoth HarperCollins actually prepared and started to sell an atlas that does not show Israel. At all. Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank are there.

No big surprise, there was lots of pushback when word got out, and HC removed the atlas from circulation and said it would pulp any remaining copies. Even the UK Bishops’ Conference Department of International Affairs condemned the publication as a blow against peace in the region.

The company sheepishly withdrew, saying,

HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.

But the company is talking out of two sides of its mouth. Earlier, as reported in the Washington Post, it tried to justify the omission:

Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the Tablet that it would have been “unacceptable” to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”

HarperCollins has quickly found out that it’s also unacceptable to abandon truth in a volume that claims to offer

“in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”

Ummm, hello, and just how do you intend to put the region in context if you ignore the most conflicted issue it faces? Do you really think students in Arab countries haven’t heard of it? Did you really think this would stay a safe little conspiratorial secret just for the cognoscenti?

HarperCollins would have been totally justified in marking the West Bank and Gaza as disputed territory held by Israel, following conquest. But there’s no dispute about Israel being a nation.

This is a time when we all have social media at our disposal. That means it not only should have been totally obvious that this would backfire, but HarperCollins had the tools at its disposal to make the governments demanding this absurdity to be the ones looking ridiculous. If any governments insisted on refusing entry to accurate atlases, the company could have had a skilled social media manager explain why HC would no longer sell atlases into these countries, and create a pressure movement both from outside the country and from those inside who recognize that not knowing geography is a handicap in the global economic arena, and the Gulf states would have lifted the restriction.

Instead, what HarperCollins has done is to eliminate its own credibility. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the future trusting any reference materials from this publisher. Blatant and deliberate repudiation of truth is not a recipe for success in the world of reference books—especially reference books about the world.

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