TNG Blog

December 31st… great time to sum up the year that will be left behind in a number of hours. Over the last week, it seems that one can’t stop thinking “Wow! What a ride 2011 was…” while reading articles that summarize 2011 events on one page. Lots of real life events and lots of turbulence transmitted to the economy, both positively (UK’s economy got £620 million boost from Royal Wedding) and negatively (tsunami in Japan damaged its economy for $300 billion)

Absorbing all of this information, one can’t avoid questioning what 2012 is cooking for us, realizing this time more than ever that some unpredictable natural or social events can drive or slow down our businesses and the economy as a whole. If we ignore that the Internet’s ‘2012 predictions’ warn us only about the end of the world, we small business owners are left to prepare for what we know will come:

- The US presidential election, where ‘small business’ will be again in the spotlight

- The London Olympics, where an additional boost of £ 10 billion is forecasted for the UK economy – and UK small businesses should be aware of this the most

- Batman, Spiderman and Hobbit together with the Avengers are coming (back) to movie theaters in 2012;  if you embrace the buzz, your small business could profit from these heroes

While 2012 still holds a dose of mystery for small businesses, it feels good to say that a large number of expected trends for 2012 are much more obvious. If we reflect on what people predicted a couple of years ago about upcoming trends, we can see redundancy from year to year. The green trend, the social media trend, the mobile trend, the blogging trend, the localization trend in small business, etc…. haven’t we heard it all, each year in the recent past?  So, what’s new if we read somewhere that ‘social media’ is still a trend for 2012, when it has been a trend to watch the last couple of years? Haven’t we spoken about mobile websites being a must already for the last couple of years, so why does it continue to be a trend to watch in 2012? What…blogging is also a necessity in 2012?

Last call guys! The trends that we’ve been following the last couple of years are no longer trends, but the way business is going to be done in 2012, so be ready to adapt or die. If you haven’t already taken them seriously and done something along these lines – you have a lot to do in 2012…like now!

Still, when you immerse your business in 2012’s trends, maintain cautious optimism. People across the web are moderately optimistic after looking at current economic indicators. The word on the street is that consumer confidence continues to rise and unemployment claims continue to fall – sounds like good climate for small business, right? If you cautiously accept this optimism and if you do it right, you might save some money, grow your business, and have more flexibility with your time – ah, a small business owner’s dream, right!

Flexibility…I remember when I started my own business: my friends and family didn’t take me seriously. Somehow the only thing they saw was that I was able to reply to their emails at 11AM and to pick up the phone whenever they called – so I was not exactly working…right? What they did not realize was that my working day did not start at 9AM and finish at 5PM, and that some weekends I had to forget about the ‘week-end’. Welcome to my world! That tendency will probably become more notable in 2012. Given that technology has become so accessible and that the world has become a global village, one can really do a lot from his or her bed at 11PM. Small business owners will have easy connectivity to their customers and more flexibility with their time. Saving money and growing your business…technology continues to rapidly evolve and present us with more options to choose from, resulting in much cheaper if not completely free software. Applications are going to boom even more in the following years, and they can finish so much for us. In 2012, you should say it loud and proud…that you are a bit more optimistic than you were at the beginning of 2011. Just please, say it cautiously.

A Cautious Happy New 2012!

Oh, those trends! Even if you try to ignore them, they somehow find a way to enslave you. It seems that one just cannot win this battle! Even if we engage in this tussle….in the long run it is almost inevitable that the war will be lost for most of us, at some point. That’s why the best way for us – small business owners – is to find the right balance between what our business essentially is and what it stands for, while incorporating particular elements of ever-changing trends. But! Easier said than done, right? Getting on top of the trend game is not easy even for the big guys – trust me! We often think that our limited marketing budgets are the main obstacle to creating outstanding promotions and incorporating a breakthrough marketing campaign. However, by looking at the big guys, we somehow realize that a big marketing budget does not always guarantee staying on top of the game, but occasionally following in someone else’s footsteps, copying, or even plagiarizing have led to success stories.

This month’s story has to start with the so-often-mentioned Old Spice campaign, launched in February 2010 as one of that year’s Super Bowl commercials. Wieden + Kennedy managed to produce The It Campaign ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ – a marketing program that is still in trend. The approach of targeting women for a men’s product (because HELLO, we are the ones who do most of the household shopping, which it seems only Wieden + Kennedy noticed) and utilizing shock marketing in a dynamic or even provocative setting, followed by a direct response to fans after an initial positive reaction, sounds like a good formula for a product certainly at or past its maturity in the product lifecycle. Can you think about something more banal than shower gel? No. Can you think about a sexier way to sell such a trivial item than Wieden + Kennedy did? No. All questions answered. But, we are not the only ones who noticed such a unique recipe.

After ‘Old Spice Guy’ managed to travel from the shower to a horse on the beach in just 33 seconds, people suddenly realized that you don’t need a spokesperson to stand still and talk about a product, or even a logical sequence of events related to the product, but rather a dynamic, engaging commercial that would catch the eye of viewers and remain memorable. If a guy who’s supposed to be taking a shower with a particular product can be everywhere, then it is certainly logical that a guy who uses a certain cleaning product can also be everywhere, right?  And, he was! Trespassing through 8 different sets in 30 seconds just to get back to the kitchen where it all started – with the multi-surface cleaning product Pledge. A much different setting than the glass box and a woman who had been in the game for a while. Did Old Spice’s unique approach start a trend of more dynamic commercials? Did Old Spice start targeting the sex opposite to the one expected to drive great results? Plagiarizing by another company? No? Inspiration by Old Spice? Yes.

The fever called Old Spice was spreading like a virus. On day 1, the campaign received almost 6 million views; after the first week, Old Spice had over 40 million views – a dangerous virus, isn’t it? A phenomenon was born and shower gel was reinvented. Everybody wanted to get a piece of Old Spice…or at least the concept driving so much attention. It was merely a question of style…how to get a piece of this concept, but not look like a total plagiarizer. A good way emerged, as Blendtec actually acknowledged Old Spice, and did so in a playful way. Could we give two thumbs up for the best implementation of the Old Spice trend?

The Old Spice effect even made its way to Europe, that is, the UK to be precise. Of course, the Brits gave it a special touch with coconuts just in the right place. You can’t complain too much even if you wanted to – comments are not allowed beneath the video on You Tube (any idea why???). As far as the American culture goes, I’m not sure what response this provocative video would have generated, but as far as my European roots go, I have a sense that lots of Brits will definitely visit page 3 of The Sun newspaper. Come on, be honest!

And, the Old Spice trend continues. A big debate surfaces each time people recognize anything Old Spice related. Dairy Queen is often mentioned in this conversation. A guy on the move and an outrageous rainbow on fire, spiced up with old-fashioned shaving bunnies (how does shaving fit into a commercial for a shake???). The video is liked by about 80% of viewers on You Tube (based on likes and dislikes). Not quite a miss, right?

The rottenest example I kept for the end - Edge shaving gel. I recently saw the commercial on TV and got an ‘Old Spice’ feeling. I went immediately to You Tube just to confirm my initial sentiments and…voilà…I wasn’t the only one who sensed it. About 90% of people dislike this commercial (as of today). Harsh language was used throughout, referring to the commercial as an ‘Old Spice rip-off’. The people have spoken and you can’t deceive the ones who hold the future of your product in their hands. The investment in this video does not appear to be prudent and might even backfire for the product. I was curious about previous Edge shaving gel commercials, so I snooped around. It seems that their prior strategy involved a ‘sex sells everything’ approach. The money made from girls in bikinis was invested in the ‘oldspicetized ’ ‘Get your edge’ campaign. I guess they forgot to get their own edge first.

Googlize me! Using trends and buzzwords to get your small business on the front page of Google

“I feel like I need to make a fool of myself or do something outrageous and then somehow connect that to my business to get any hits on the Internet. This whole new era of digital marketing is going in a way that I just don’t like, but I know that I will have to catch up with the trend, one way or another.”

Keeping up with trends has never been easy. It tends to be a full-time job: trying to stay informed, processing collected information, predicting trends (with some luck) and implementing an action plan – be the first who sensed it – be a trendsetter! However, if you are not a Nostradamus-like business owner, then there is nothing wrong with being even an early follower – a successful follower who is not brave enough to predict and innovate – but surely is capable of spotting something that is becoming hot before the majority does. For a small business owner, this is just one more thing on the to-do list (unless your hobby really is reading all sorts of business-marketing-social media related articles). We small business owners do want to get on board with all the big guys and follow them – as much as our resources allow. They were predicting the social media boom – we Facebookalized and Twitterized to stay connected to our customers; they said give a voice to your business – we Blogolized; they said localize – we Yelpalized for reviews and Grouponized to get some coupons out there. Now we need to Mobilize or should I say Applicalize (although mobile marketing was mentioned in 2008 as an upcoming trend, a recent research report says that 40 percent of small businesses still don’t have a mobile ready website or application), or go viral and get out there on YouTube. By the way, do all of this while focusing on the key task – keeping your business up and running. And then even if we find time to do all of this (or we pay someone with our hard-earned money to do this for us), we are still not there – not getting enough ‘hits’ and ‘likes’ on the Internet, nor popping up on the first or second Google pages, nor getting a major bump in our revenue.

“The tragicomedy of today’s world is what people are interested in seeing and what they respond to.”

What should we do? Let’s take a look at the current situation.

If you are a small business owner that Blogolized or already YouTubechannellized, and you somehow found the context to mention Charlie Sheen in the last month, you likely realized some hits that you wouldn’t have otherwise. I mean, it’s all about passion, right? Did you have ‘Charlie Sheen’ specials? Come on, don’t disappoint me now, you want to be in the trend right, get some winning rolls? ( I guess it’s my cynical day, sorry guys, this is how I roll sometimes.)

Or, giving a kick on Friday to your community with Rebecca Black’s “Friday”? At least if you Facebookalize yourself, your followers would get a good laugh. Don’t you want to add some amusement to your marketing mix while your name pops up in front of your follower’s eyes?

If we keep looking around current trends, we see that you just need to do something totally outrageous or somehow only interject into your own context ‘the most interesting man in the world’; after all, that is exactly how you want you/your own business to be perceived. Outrageous marketing is definitely the ‘in thing’ – with the ‘most interesting man in the world’ in a head-to-head matchup with the outrageous Old Spice guy. Can you turn your customer’s world upside-down with a new marketing approach or, even better, with your service or product…sort of like both of these guys can? Aren’t trends weird? Is being weird and different today the only thing that triggers customers’ attention?

So what can we do about all these trends? Should we follow them, embrace all of the pros and cons that they bring? Get sucked into trivial and dull for more exposure?  How much is enough to stay current but not get lost? Can we Googlize ourselves painlessly to get those über-wanted hits?

So, how is big business coming to an end with these trends? They make a ‘virus’ and spread it! We can’t do it like Smart Water (money is just ‘a little’ obstacle), but at least we can learn from them and admire them for squishing all the current trends and top searchable words into one marketing gig:  Jennifer Aniston (ok, no link on J.A. we all know who she is), Keenan Cahill, G6, internet nerds, animals (puppies and parrots), babies (dancing babies), dirty dancing (uuuu), double rainbow, sex tape. Lots of hits, can you feel it?

Sweet, right? I don’t know if you heard, somewhere among all the buzz about Charlie Sheen and about Ms. Black’s Friday, but Japan was almost wiped off the face of the Earth. Maybe it’s time for you to get that flyer or e-banner out there to raise awareness and raise some funds to help Japan.

Picture this … it’s dinner time, after a tough day at work, you and your family finally get together for a nice meal and some quality family time. There is laughter, stories, and the smell of a freshly cooked meal…ideal. The telephone rings.  You are caught off guard and an enthusiastic marketer from the other side asks for only five minutes of your time, to answer some questions. How do you react:

1) You enthusiastically answer the questions

2) You grudgingly agree to 5 minutes of your precious time, answering questions while your hands begin to sweat and you feel your heart start to race

3) You politely apologize that you don’t have 5 minutes and hang up the phone

4) You pick up and angrily tell him that you are already on the Do Not Call Registry and that he shouldn’t call you at all, while irately hanging up the phone

5) You pick up, listen briefly, and hang up the phone without saying anything

6) #6 is not the case here – since you already picked up the phone – but you could just simply not pick up

Recently, I was personally targeted by a similar telemarketing campaign. I believe that I’m the worst kind of target: curious, answering questions with questions, and myself a marketer.  I found it a particularly interesting social phenomenon that I was being engaged during dinner time and was curious enough not to hang up. Even though I actively listened for a few minutes, I cannot remember the exact objective of the marketer (obviously a good indication of the effectiveness of the call), but I do recall that the marketer lacked the appropriate educational level and communication skills to even remotely interest me for his product, service, or other objective. In fact, I recall deeply considering the inadequacies of the telemarketing strategy of this company, a poorly written script that was given to a bad actor, and of course very poor timing – dinner time.  Consider that there are many other alternatives techniques and you will ask yourself why a company would choose to continue with a somewhat outdated marketing method. For example, why would this same company not invest in pay-per-click advertising or some form of Social Media marketing that would allow a target customer to alone determine when, at a more appropriate time, he or she would go to the internet, respond to an advertisement, and convert into a lead without the active influence of a marketer. Below is my quick analysis of the pros and cons of both approaches and why one might choose one over the other.

Isn’t ‘tradeoff’ the first word that comes to your mind, right after ‘wow’? Isn’t this the most typical dilemma that the business world is facing today: efficiency vs. effectiveness? We are all aware that various social media services are experiencing dramatic growth, not only for the purpose of maintaining our friendships and professional relationships, but also for building new relationships, whether mutual partnerships, employment opportunities, or business development opportunities. One can venture to say that it is even becoming the leading venue for marketing and sales generation among certain niche markets or customer segments. Nevertheless, it seems that quite a few for-profit companies and not-for-profit initiatives continue to avoid these platforms in favor of more archaic methodologies, such as telemarketing. In a time when each person wants to be in greater control of what they will do and when, and when a random mistimed telephone call is obviously annoying, it is time to let go of some old fashioned techniques and invest in a social media expert rather than an offshore telemarketer.