City of Paris

Monday’s cover story in Advertising Age, “Bud’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand” caused quite a buzz at ad agencies. The article squarely blames the consulting firm for driving the campaign that resulted in Bud Light’s first-ever full-year sales decline in history. The “Drinkability” campaign focused on process and product attributes (less watery than Coors, less bitter than Miller Lite, and you can drink a lot of it), a change in direction from the previous emotional appeals. One agency principal commented that one fundamental problem is that consultants are good at linear thinking and process, which tends to ignore the emotional component so critical in advertising.

What a great example this is for healthcare marketers. I chuckle at the reference to product attributes as I think about my frequent discussions with product managers and my attempts to persuade them to whittle down their list of “unique” features or to make their “single most important message” truly singular. Some might say that marketing to professionals about products they use in a work setting (e.g., healthcare) is different from consumer marketing. I say that these are the people who forget that we are dealing with human beings, not decision-making algorithms on a computer.

As to the role of consultants, most of us in the agency business have experienced run-ins with some bright star from a big-name consulting firm who comments, by invitation or not, on communication strategy and creative concepts. Most of these comments add up to no more than brief disruptions and annoyances. In those instances when the agency does find itself heading toward a subordinate role in communication strategy, then it’s time to look inward to see if the agency team is falling short on strategy and original ideas. If the agency has been delivering consistently, then there may be other factors such as the communication between agency and client, or the introduction of a powerful newcomer, as in the arrival of a new CEO (an Anheuser-Busch heir) in the case of Bud Light. It seems that at the end of the day, it all comes back to humans and their interactions.

Depending on whom you talk to, corporate identity can be very exciting, as it is often to an entrepreneur who is creating a new company, very restrictive (to someone who doesn’t like to follow rules but who happens to work in a big corporation) or a strategic component within an overall communication program, which to me is a pragmatic way of looking at it. And what I mean by pragmatism is that we need to look at corporate identity in light of the role it plays in helping a company accomplish its business goals and not how it provides an outlet for a company stakeholder’s creativity or self-expression. With this perspective, then, the process of building and maintaining a corporate identity becomes more objective and rational. The emotions that we are concerned about are those of our audience, not of internal stakeholders involved in the process. Suddenly, it’s easier to make decisions, because making choices based on well-defined, business-focused criteria is far simpler than figuring out who likes what or reconciling personal preferences. With this in mind, I would like to offer some basic rules I’ve learned to follow.

Consistency trumps creativity. I often counsel clients that the discipline and consistency with which a corporate identity system is implemented are far more important than how unique, original or visually distinctive it is. Standing out from the crowd is not bad, but consistently communicating the identity that a business has carefully crafted will ultimately create the desired image—one that builds value for the business.

Keep it simple. Sometimes the corporate identity “policy” goes overboard with complex rules that indeed are restrictive but, even worse, difficult to follow. For those of us who are in a position to write style guides, we need to remember that corporate identity is implemented at many levels, from the specialists in marketing and communications departments to the many business disciplines that communicate with customers, prospective employees and corporate partners on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find more followers when the rules are easy to understand.

Beyond the visual identity. I always like to quote Clive Chajet, who speaks of the brand as the sum total of a corporation’s conversation with society. Corporate identity goes beyond logos, typography, colors, grids and all those graphic parameters, to the way your receptionist (or computer voice) answers the telephone, office décor, attire, business practices, interaction with the community, etc.

If you’re interested in reading more about corporate identity and related topics, here are two of my favorites: Marketing Aesthetics by Alex Simonson and Bernd H. Schmitt and Image by Design: From Corporate Vision to Business Reality by Clive Chajet.

There are many reminders in the media that the anticipated defeat of the current healthcare reform bill is nothing but history replaying itself, and 75 years of history at that. But it’s easy to forget how similar the issues are. In 1994, when all the buzz was around Hillary Clinton’s efforts, my agency, Lena Chow Advertising, worked with the team at Syva Company (today a part of Siemens Healthcare through multiple iterations of acquisitions) to conduct a healthcare reform survey as part of a promotion. A preshow mailer drew hundreds of attendees to Syva’s booth on the exhibit floor of the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry. We then published the results in a journal ad. The bottom line: 80.3 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the cost of doing nothing far outweighs the cost of reform.”

Now I want to go back and read, one more time, the last chapter of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, where authors David Blumenthal and James Morone highlight the critical steps required for passage of healthcare reform. Obviously, every president since Roosevelt has managed to skip one or more steps, leading to the demise of the aspired-to reform.

Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, must be engaged in some publicity program for his school. He appeared in an article in Sunday’s New York Times and wrote an editorial in today’s Financial Times. Both articles argue for the importance of critical and creative thinking, and lament the inability of today’s MBA programs to provide the necessary training. “True value in business comes not from applying quantitative analytical techniques to choose from among existing options but from creating options that do not yet exist,” writes Martin. He points to a major barrier to critical, creative thinking: the overreliance on theories and models that are seldom multidisciplinary, and advocates a more “liberal arts” (interdisciplinary, cross-cultural) approach to business school curriculum.

For those of us who are marketing and communication practitioners, our MBAs behind us, what can we do to improve our critical and creative thinking skills? In this time of New Year’s resolutions, I can think of three things I want to do or do more of. First, I plan on reading more—not just more business books, but more reading, in general. Being an immigrant, I have become, belatedly, very interested in politics and history. And, these days, healthcare is inextricably linked to politics. Second, I am going to look for the right venue for developing my thinking skills—a workshop or some other form of professional or personal development, or participating in a novel project. Third, I want to spend more time with my clients and my creative teams, working with them to look at problems and issues from different perspectives, writing tighter briefs, asking the creative teams more questions (and in turn giving more ideas the benefit of the doubt).

The dawn of the new millennium doesn’t feel like that long ago. Remember the days when the Y2K bug was our primary concern? A look at the lists of “10 best” and “10 most” of the year—or the decade—is telling of our times and the choices we face.

On energy, Financial Times posed two lists of questions to consider:
Top 10 energy questions for 2010 - Hydrocarbons edition
Top 10 questions for 2010 - Climate change and clean tech edition

For a quick recap, here is a comic strip to take us through the history of finance of the past decade.

Where do we begin on healthcare? For those of us who are still undecided, here are 10 reasons to support the healthcare reform bills.

Or vote on the healthcare deal of the year.

Everyone is writing about social media. Here are two that may interest healthcare marketers. Top 50 Twitter Topics of the Year and the Top Viral Videos of 2009.

And finally, lest we forget: Top 10 Worst Humanitarian Crises.

Earlier this year, March 4 to be exact, I opened a Twitter account, out of curiosity about what it could do and wanting to learn more about social media. I had a few friends who were on Twitter and I started off having one-on-one exchanges with them. Then I began tweeting to let people know when I posted a new blog. Slowly but surely, Twitter has become one of the first sites I visit in the morning when I sit down at my desk. I made a number of new friends, and many of the people I follow have become one of my primary sources of information about healthcare, marketing, communications, ethics, business policy—all the things that I need to stay relevant in my work. I am not a “high profile” user with hundreds and thousands of followers, but perhaps next year I’ll aspire to becoming a Brand or Maven or Mensch as described by Guy Kawasaki.

What I really like about Twitter is the openness. Unlike on LinkedIn or Facebook, for example, most Twitter users welcome new followers. In most cases you can start following someone right away. Out of curiosity, the people you choose to follow may follow you back, and vice versa. This is how I’ve made most of my “friends” on Twitter. Even though I’ve never met many of them, I feel like many of them are friends after seeing each person’s picture next to his or her tweet almost every day. By contrast, LinkedIn is most useful to me when I want to look up someone I know and reconnect with them. Ditto Facebook.

The catch is that some people who sign up as followers have ulterior motives. Here is what I mean. Many people consider followers on Twitter more or less as assets. The more followers you have, the broader your reach. At the very minimum I suppose it confers bragging rights. Taking this to the extreme, you can “buy” followers. (I have lost track of the link to information about how this can be done.) Another strategy sometimes used is to sign up as a follower, ostensibly, to as many different Twitter users as possible, knowing that some will reciprocate. I discovered how this worked by accident, when I observed that, at times, when a follower signs up and I don’t reciprocate, I get dropped in short order.

If you’re not already on Twitter and want to give it a try in 2010, I highly recommend it! And here are a few interesting people to consider following. Most of them are in the healthcare space.

http://twitter.com/ChristianeTrue
http://twitter.com/EdBennett
http://twitter.com/rilescat
http://twitter.com/Phrmageddon2012
http://twitter.com/kevinmd
http://twitter.com/FierceBiotech
http://twitter.com/scotthensley
http://twitter.com/pharmalot
http://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog
http://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki
http://twitter.com/cityofparis (that’s me!)