Recently in Marketing Category

Dominic here.

June 23 was the final Waseda Marketing Forum of the academic year, which went off with a bang with World Wrestling Entertainments (WWE) VP of East Asia Marketing, Ed Wells. Before arriving at the WWE a year and a half ago, he worked at major entertainment companies like Fox, Viacom, Nickelodean, MTV, and Disney, and is the consummate entertainment marketer. WWE is his latest, and possibly most exciting assignment yet.

The WWE has come out of a gradual transition from what many remember as the World Wrestling Federation, and has become a fully integrated multimedia company with a market cap of nearly 900 million USD. Mr. Wells presented some pretty shocking facts about the WWE's success: they are publicly traded company on the NYSE, they broadcast in 145 countries in 30 languages, they are the United States' longest running weekly episodic show, they are the #1 program on their respective channels, and for the past three years they are the number two searched entity on Yahoo!, behind Britney Spears and beating out Barack Obama, even during an election season.

Mr. Well's presentation was entitled "Marketing to the masses in an increasingly diversified marketplace," but what he wanted to focus on was "marketing in the day of the incredible shrinking budget," a topic that was perhaps more relevant and universal for the audience. He listed three important factors for marketers to remember; creating an emotional connection, integrating and leading, knowing your assets, and knowing your limits.

Emotional Connection - As an entertainment company, their wrestling broadcasts contain distinctive characters and storylines. The success of a talent ( a wrestler ) is not solely judged by the wrestling ability, but also by their ability to connect with the audience. "You either make it pop, or you don't. If you don't you can expect to be phased out." The ability to emotionally connect with the audience is what makes the fans of the WWE so loyal in following their favorite stars through different mediums, and makes them so varied in age, race, and gender.

Integrating and Leading - As a multimedia entertainment company, Mr. Wells displayed the media assets through the form of a wheel, which listed mediums like television, magazines, pay per view, talent, internet, mobile, etc. Every one of these mediums is an entry point for their audience, but it is even more important to lead the audience to go around the wheel, following the WWE through different mediums. Leading them around the wheel has to be logical to the user. "Does it make sense in a multinational setting?"

Know your assets - In the day of slashed marketing budgets knowing what assets you can utilize is important. Agencies can be expensive. The WWE tries to keep as much of what do in-house, from production crews to marketing.

Know your limits- The caveat. There are people that can do things better than you, and it is essential that you utilize their expertise. In Japan, collaboration is an important tool to reach the market, as the WWE recently did with popular local artists to create t-shirts promoting their brand.

The WWE will have a tour in Tokyo at the Budokan on July 7th and 8th. Check out their website here, tickets are still available.

Shack here. This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is one of my new favorite dailies; I feel like I'll be reading these archives for the next few days. The author, one Grant McCracken, on a recent PepsiCo branding debacle:

You've heard about the PepsiCo debacle? It will be a case study and a cautionary tale for many years to come.

In the apt words of Stuart Elliott,

It took 24 years, but PepsiCo now has its own version of New Coke.

The basic details: Sometime in 2008, PepsiCo Americas CEO Massimo d'Amore decided to rebrand the Pepsi, Gatorade, Tropicana and Mountain Dew.

It's epic error. It represents perhaps the largest and most cavilier destruction of brand value we will ever see.

I want to concentrate on Tropicana. A new Tropicana package was launched in January (package on right) to replace a package of long standing (on left). This was then withdrawn in late February. But not before sales had fallen 20%. Consumers were furious.

So what was PepsiCo thinking? Here's Peter Arnell, the man D'Amore asked to do the Tropicana package design.

*The objective was very, very clearly laid out. We needed to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture. *

On balance, this sounds like a laudatory end. Of course a brand should be in touch with popular culture.

But let's look at what Peter Arnell, acting as Pepsi's unofficial Chief Culture Officer, thinks this means. His first act of office, apparently, was to embark upon what BusinessWeek calls a "five-week world tour of trendy design houses."

This is where he went searching for culture? In design houses? Dude. A CCO is not just responsible for culture as defined by designers. He or she is also responsible for all the rest of American culture. And he won't find this exhaustively represented in design houses. Indeed, the rest of American culture is, I would argue, sometimes systematically excluded from the design houses.

(full excellent article here)

I find that a lot of design-house "design" has artistic merit, but takes a few generations to turn into something with both aesthetic and mass appeal. Regular consumers don't want to be challenged by their brands, they want to be comforted and affirmed. H&M, Apple, and Ikea get this: they wrap little seeds of high design in intuition and accessibility. It's cool to be cool, but if your market doesn't "get" it, you've failed.

Dominic here.

The Waseda Marketing Forum is a monthly event for graduate students and industry professionals organized by Professor Kenneth Grossberg of the Waseda Business School, The latest forum, held on April 23rd, featured Charles Nikiel, VP Japan Marketing for salesforce.com, a cloud computing and on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) company. The presentation was entitled "marketing disruptive information", and highlighted the marketing strategy salesforce.com used to become a billion dollar company in 10 years.

Mr. Nikiel stated that salesforce.com's astonishing rise has come from its ability to deliver a comprehensive, scalable and web-based IT infrastructure to businesses. He argued that the current IT industry is a hairball of inefficient and complicated pieces, including software ($327 billion industry), hardware ($562 billion), and services ($587 billion).

Salesforce.com takes all the IT requirements of a company into the cloud, accessible from any location with an internet connection and a web browser. With transparent security and easy accessibility, salesforce.com allows companies to do what they do best: innovate and deliver fantastic products.

Charles Nikiels Marketing Plays

1.    Create a story for the audience; use a protagonist (cloud computing) an antagonist (software) and have a plot that reads like a traditional comic book.
2.    Talk about the big picture: Although Google is in the search business, its mission is to organize the information of the world. Though salesforce.com is in the CRM industry, it declares the end of software.
3.    Use metaphors: "Software is like a well, where you had to go to your own backyard and work for your water. Cloud computing is like your faucet; water is delivered to you from a centralized system and is easy to access."
4.    Make the event big. Think Macworld. Salesforce.com recently held an event for 9000 developers and customers.
5.    Differentiate your brand.
6.    Challenge the leader: When you're on the bottom, talk only about the number one competitor. When you're number one don't talk about anyone else other than yourself.
7.    Let tactics dictate strategy
8.    Find a mixed marketing strategy that works. Keep trying until you find a strategy that works.
9.    Make every employee a key player: be sure that they understand the overall objectives of the company, and allow them to see the big picture.
10.    Always be relevant.

Attended by: Dominic and Guillaume