Category: Uncategorized

Some new product packaging warning labels folks would like to see, via Make:

You think marketing has a marketing problem? Can’t help but see these and thing of the McDonald’s / Hummer incident of a few weeks back.

Just listened to the most recent podcast from Jeff Hoyt, which addresses the frustrations of call center hell. Hoyt’s an accomplished voice actor, and presents the topic in an interesting way…sort of a Seinfeld-meets-This-American-Life sorta thing. (This is helped by the fact that he sometimes gets into the interesting situation where he is forced to listen to himself tell himself that his call is very important to him, since he is actually the recorded voice on a number of these type of systems.) Check it out here.

Overheard yesterday at the little guy’s school:

Little Guy (whose shoelaces had come undone, and needed help tying them): “Why don’t you double-knot it?”

Teacher: “Because if I double-knot it, you won’t get better at tying them.” (smile)

Just because something doesn’t work, it’s not always a “failure.”
Sometimes it’s just practice.

They didn’t.

They DIDN’T.

Yes, they did.

Edelman’s “news trough.”

(Let the porcine puns commence! More here, btw.)

(photo credit: http://umichangallery.clarence.com/)

According to RonaldMcHummer.com, McDonald’s has given away 42 million Hummer toys as part of their most recent Happy Meal promotion. Not surprisingly, a number of individuals who view the Hummer as a symbol of rampant eco-destruction have made a shrill outcry. Some parents may find the choice of toy to be upsetting as this isn’t a suitable toy for a child to be playing with. Alternatively, parents could opt for a healthier meal elsewhere before going home and playing with their child helped by watching a nursery ryhme on youtube. This would be an educational play time compared to your child playing with a grease stained hummer.

Now, from a marketing and customer interaction perspective, the interesting bit about this brouhaha is not the outcry itself, but rather the McDonald’s response. Bob Langert, Vice President for Corporate Citizenship and Issues Management at McDonald’s, has put forth an interesting bit of NewSpeak on the McDonald’s Corporate Social Responsibility blog, regarding the promotion. Langert states:

“Our company, including my staff, is deeply committed to the whole scope of corporate responsibility issues, including environmental protection. So I polled my staff who have or had children. One of them said her children enjoy the little Hummer replicas as toys, just as many kids like toy trucks, regardless of make or model. She drives a MiniCooper, walks with her children to get groceries, bicycles with them on weekends, etc. Another said her grandchildren absolutely love the toy Hummers–that they’re fun.

Of course, there’s nothing scientific about this poll, but I think it makes an important point. Looked at through children’s eyes, the miniature Hummers are just toys, not vehicle recommendations or a source of consumer messages about natural resource conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.”

 

Bob, you dropped the ball here. Big time. There are about a dozen comments on your blog on the matter, none of which you’ve addressed directly. You’ve given a pat, Teflon-coated response to an issue that is of concern to many of your customers. In fact, the response you’ve given isn’t even a response — it’s a mis-direction and a diversion.

Without stepping up and giving a real answer and providing some real direction, you are doing nothing more than using a new medium (blogs) to reinforce the negative perceptions that already exist about your organization. In fact, you are solidifying those perceptions further.

(Thanks to Jay Rosen for the tip.)

Others in the conversation:

http://www.emergencemarketing.com/archives/2006/09/more_people_unhappy_with.php
http://funnybusiness.typepad.com/funnybusiness/2006/09/mcdonalds_vice_.html
http://www.enviroblog.org/2006/09/mcdonalds_responds_to_hummer_p.htm
http://cityhippy.blogspot.com/2006/09/news-mchummer-ok-say-mcdonalds.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/mcdonalds-responds-to-the-happ-002240.php
http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/mcdonalds_blog_.html

Barry Parr’s Coastsider reports:

“A vendor has been selected to set up a free wireless Internet service, using wifi, that is supposed to cover San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties and to stretch “west to Half Moon Bay” according to some reports.

The vendor, a partnership of Cisco Systems, IBM, SeaKay and Azulstar—still has to come to agreements with local governments.”

The San Mateo County Times adds:

“At no cost to the cities involved, Metro Connect intends to make its money back through advertisements and through charging user fees for faster connections. The service will be free at one megabyte per second downstream and 50 to 60KB upstream, and is primarily intended to be used outdoors.”

Awesome news, if it gets approval. (Although with the slow upload rates, it’s going to take Scoble a long time to upload his movies.)

Okay, here’s where customer co-creation gets interesting. (John Winsor, are you out there?) A group of students at the IT University in Copenhagen, and Superflex, a Copenhagen-based artist collective have brought free beer to the world. In their words:

“The project…applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product – namely the alcoholic beverage loved and enjoyed globally, and commonly known as beer.

The recipe and branding elements of FREE BEER is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work. All design and branding elements are available to beer brewers, and can be modified to suit, provided changes are published under the same license (”Attribution & Share Alike”) . The aim was to start an experiment in applying modern open source ideas and methods on a traditional real-world product (beer). At the end of the course, Superflex decided to continue the experiment and changed the name to FREE BEER.”

I look at this experiment and think, “why not?” Customers are involved in giving feedback to the product. The product continually improves and evolves to meet new market trends and ideas. (E.g. FREE BEER 3.0 contains Guarana “for a natural energy boost.”) There’s an inherent, DIY, Make-ishness about the process. And producers are free to make a profit on the product, which will be driven solely by how well they connect with and serve customers (since the product itself is not a differentiator)…and are even encouraged to improve on the product, as long as they feed back into the virtuous cycle.

I love it.

(via Lessig)

Been thinking about this one a lot recently. We all change and (hopefully!) evolve over time. As I’ve observed myself, friends and acquaintances go through this process, there seem to be two types of people.

The first are individuals who change in a directed fashion. That is, as they age, they change along a vector that goes in a single direction, and once in the new “place,” have a difficult, if not impossible, time going back to earlier “versions” of themselves.

The second are individuals who change in a subsumptive fashion. That is, as they age, they change by adding new “layers” to themselves, while still retaining (and retaining access) to the earlier layers that got them to where they are today.

Both types of individuals change over time, but their outlooks on life seem very different to me.

Bonus thought: This may apply to organizations as well…can your organization access its inner startup when it needs to? Or has it changed so much that it’s impossible to get back to the roots that made it great in the first place?

(See HP)

Mike Masnick: “Lenovo has suddenly decided to start a new division ‘to focus on customers.’ This, of course, should probably make you wonder just what the company was focused on before. Customer focus isn’t the sort of thing that you should set up a separate division for. It should be a part of the entire corporate culture.”

(Lenovo purchased IBM’s personal computer division in 2004.)

Time for a brief diversion into the tangible world. When one spends most of one’s time being virtual, taking a few moments out every now and then to do something with wood and metal and paint…you know, stuff…is needed to recenter one’s perspective.

On that note, today was the maiden voyage of our current real-world-stuff construction project, a tiny little “teardrop” camper-trailer. After working on it in the off hours for the last couple of weekends and in the evenings, it’s getting close to completion. But, even in its current shape, the Department of Motor Vehicles has deemed it road-worthy, so here it is!

A few more things to do (add a couple of round “porthole” windows, get the back deck locks in place, one more coat of red paint on the curve, etc.), but we’re getting pretty close.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming in the world of ones and zeros.