Which comes first the product or the marketing? The chicken or the egg?

Pesky questions that they are.  They require careful thinking even when you’re planning a concert.

If you are the largest telecommunications company in the country, used to throwing around your advertising might, you’d probably  think it’s the product. Because once you have the product, especially if it is as attractive and commercial  as Beyonce, you probably figure all you have to do  is throw your advertising dollar behind it  and voila,  you can count on your pot of gold.  

That’s foolish. Stupid really.

Marketing is not the same as advertising. In 2010, advertising is a  sliver  of what marketing is, and in fact, it is pretty clear that the marketing has to come before the product, not after.

And so onto the Beyonce  and the B Mobile equation.

Great product + poor planning - expert events management + huge advertising  spend - marketing thinking = 1  of the most spectacular event/concert  failures in recent history (barring Machel Montano stand collapsing incident  concert over a decade ago).

Here’s the essential factor that B mobile’s  brand managers forgot.Just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first. Sure it’s super desirable to have a great product but the role of the product is to make the marketing story come true. It’s not at all difficult to conceive. In fact, the marketing thinking for the Beyonce concert should have been  built  on some very fundamental questions:

1) Who is the concert for?

2) How will the audience  be segmented?

3) What will add value to their  individual experience so that each person walks out   of the concert  as a brand loyalist?

4) What systems will be put in place to ensure the product is enjoyed with maximum pleasure? 

5) Who will comprise  the team that ensures the effective delivery of the events system?

6) What is the experience of the team?

7) What checks and balances  will be put in place to make sure the brand is never compromised in the process?

These are smart questions because if you rush to advertise  the product without thinking through the marketing systems, you’ve already lost the essence of the thing.

To be frank, I was not among the nay sayers that knocked TSTT/Bmobile for bringing Beyonce to Trinidad or aligning their brand to the mega superstar's light. In an overcrowded market place with an inattentive audience, it is the conundrum of all brand managers: how to draw the right kind of attention and create something so interesting and so valuable that people will cause people to not only spend their time and money and also sit up and take note. ROI is not always about the bottom line in the short term. Sometimes the marathon run of building good will and reputation can leave your competitors standing in the dust.

Still, when this party was over the only dust was that of the Savannah and it was blowing all over the TSTT’s face. There were several mistakes made on the night Beyonce graced the Savannah stage. They are already described eloquently and angrily here. But I’ll focus briefly on 2, the events management and the company’s use of social media.

Events Management

Not giving the project to event experts was a fundamental mistake. No project should be  conceived in a vacuum, no decision  should be made in isolation and no negotiation can happen with a muddied sheet of paper when it comes to events planning. Clearly the  lead events team simply did not   have the expertise? But here’s the bigger question, why did TSTT and Bmobile not sense this? In events planning, you go through the systems  during several meetings with the client, you explain the systems, you work through the issues, you present your plans. With everyone around the table and with the client in the lead,  thorny issues are spotted and thrashed out. Clearly this did not happen. TSTT did not exercise enough due diligence and as a consequence their brand was severely compromised.

Social Media

For over the decade that I have been writing about Public Relations, I have always maintained that the process of communication is a great litmus test of the transparency and honesty of a company. So here’s another question for Bmobile. Why did they use facebook for weeks before the concert  to communicate with their fans and yet when the crisis hit the rooftop last week TSTT/Bmobile remained silent. There was no apology, no statement, no admittance of the technical mistakes made, no explanation of what went wrong on their social media streams. That should have happened within the first 24 hours of the mess.  Instead in its absence, fans took to Bmobile’s facebook  to paint  their corporate wall in the most colorful language. And from the company, not a peep.

Marketing will always be an art and a science. You test. You measure. You do the math. You try to understand  the impact of your  spend and your message  in the market at the time its dissemination, and even long after. That’s the science part.  And then there’s the art. And here it is not about the fancy billboards and the advertising spend. In the age of social media it really was about how Bmobile used the concert and the experience to inspire and connect. It was about how they worked to create a brand movement by surprising their stakeholders with the most  amazing of experiences. 

In both the science and the art Bmobile failed simply because they forgot for a mammoth moment, that the chicken never, ever comes before the egg.

In 2009 global ad spend was down 12 %

Magazine and newspaper are predicted to decline through 2010 with magazine spend down 20% and newspaper, 24%. 

The mix of advertising will change forever, away from newspaper and magazine toward digital.

Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts that the total digital spend in 2013 will be 31% of total ad spend versus 21% in 2008.

 88% of global marketers are planning to increase their spend in digital media  

52% will increase spend in mobile media

41% will increase spend in PR

35% will increase spend in events

 Meanwhile, PWC predicts half of marketers will cut print and 40% will cut TV spending.

The question is what are you going to do about it?

I saw Michael Jackson’s This is It  over the weekend, it’s a must see for fans. For those hankering for the details of a tragic past you won’t find that in this movie. 

This is it is simply a movie about process, about all the elements, ordinary and extraordinary,  that went into to producing the would-be concert. And because it’s about process, the movie is triumphant. 

 Two observations struck me:  1) That genius takes work and discipline, discipline and work  2) The concert would have been something the likes of which we had  never seen before.  

Worldwide sales have been very solid.

This Is It pulled in $101 million in its first five days. And distributor Sony is extending the farewell performance film beyond its planned two-week run. In the US, the movie was the No. 1 Halloween choice enjoying a $21.3 million in the opening weekend.

There was something else that struck me about the movie. It was produced by the Michael Jackson Company giving much credence to the fact that a super, personal brand needs management, even in death.

According to NPR, it appears that the decisions about how Jackson's image and music will be used will primarily be made by two men: John McClain and John Branca. Both are longtime veterans of both the music business and the Michael Jackson industry. And they carry with them great decision making power on the usage   of Jackson’s brand. 

Jackson’s name will always big business. So too Bob Marley, the Jamaican superstar who died of brain cancer in 1981 at age 36.

Earlier this year it was reported that the Bob Marley estate had hired the Toronto-based Hilco Consumer Capital to protect their rights to the brand.  

Apparently, the Marley family is seeking to enforce their exclusive rights to an image that has grown steadily in scope and is estimated to generate US$600 million  a year in sales of unlicensed wares, none of which goes to the Marley family.  Their  legal sales are much smaller - just US$4 million in 2007, according to Forbes magazine. 

Like Marley, Jackson is more than likely to have a long and lucrative posthumous career and how the MJ  brand is managed (his is the first superstar passing in an Web 2.0 era) will have implications  on how other big, superstar, celebrity brands are handled in the future. Although it is my guess there will never be another pop star passing quite like this. 

The King of Pop may be  dead but through branding let’s just say:  ‘Long Live the King!’

The word competition  comes from Latin and literally mean “seeking together” or “choosing to run the same race”.  

But in the age of abundance the tracks got pretty crowded. 

Others continuously stepped on your toes, elbowed  and pushed you in order to get to the customers first. 

And then this revolutionary thought; maybe the way to win is not to compete.

I know. I know.  It's a paradox. 

But listen, as soon as you  start running alongside  others in your pursuit of mindshare, market-share, beauty-share - whatever, you run the  risk being one of the crowd. 

Invisible. 

Meaningless. 

The dirty little secret of market capitalism in all its forms is that successful companies have become so by killing the spirit of free enterprise. They have all succeeded in creating monopolies at least for a short moment in time. Competitiveness comes not from competing. Success arises from being different. And then being prepared to change again.

What am I really buying when I purchase a Claudia Pegus dress?

 Well, on one hand I am buying 2 yards of silk that was probably made  by some cheap labour in the Far East and cut and sewn by expert hands in the West Indies. 

But on  another level when I purchase a dress from the Woodbrook based atelier what I am really buying is hope, the hope that somehow Pegus’ dress will make me feel beautiful, disguise  my flawed hips, and win the right kind of attention.  (This actually happened with the pink suit in the photograph that was published in the Huffington Post)

My husband buys aftershave to me for no good reason. It actually serves no real purpose in my eyes except for that little fact that he smells fascinatingly  sexier with it on. That has its own consequences.

After shave = sex appeal. My Claudia Pegus dress = hope.

The moral: what companies sell and what customers want are two different things. I mean what do you really buy when you go home with an Iphone, a  can of Axe aftershave, a Benetton trousers?

The question points to a deep lesson I think and that is, every once in a while as   a seller of goods or services, it is wise to place yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask the question: What are they really buying?

 The answer, 99 times out of 100,  is often not what you think you’re selling.

 Believe me when I say that vast slices of your market are in here.

 Facebook: Over 200 million members and 80 billion monthly page views (Techcrunch)

Twitter: It now has over 44 Million unique visitors a month (according to Comscore)

YouTube: Over 100 Million visitors in March and over 13.8 Billion video views in

March alone (YouTube report)  

LinkedIn: Over 16 million unique visitors a month with a a very affluent demographic where the average user is 39 and makes $139K ayear and over 500,000 C-level members (Quantcast)

MySpace: Just under 100 million visitors a month and 43 billion page views (Techcrunch)

Digg: More traffic than the New York Times with 23 million unique visitors a month and 4.5 billion pages views (Techcrunch)

Blogs: Over 5 million blogs are tracked by Technorati, the “Bible” of Blogs with 600,000 being corporate blogs (Technorati)

Wikipedia: Nearly 63 Million Unique visitors June 2009 (Compete)

Taglines aren't just words; they should deliver on a brand's promise. And you can argue with me until the cows come home but that delivery should allow for an experience that is so authentic and real,   there is little left   but for the news of your brand to spread.  

Take Fashion Week Trinidad and Tobago (FWTT) for instance, five days of wonderful Caribbean fashion that promised heaps of glamour, fun and a bit of escapism. Did the brand deliver on all three? You bet. Funny though the organisers chose none of those values to communicate the 5-day show, preferring to go with the eco-friendly tag: '"live green, save the earth.''

I understand all too well why green is the new black. The planet is in peril and going green is one way to save it. The green messages that marketers are embracing demonstrate an eco consciousness that can influence   how we live, what we drive and what we wear; high fashion should not be above the fray.

 Several years ago designer Isaac Mizrahi sent his models down the ramp in silk chiffon slip dress worked with treated salmon skin. The material was a byproduct of fish processing plants and was considered   a trendy substitute for traditional leather. At the same show, designer Paulina Reyes worked with carvers from Latin America to supply rosewood handles and tiles for a Kate Spade collection of handbags. 

There were wonderful attempts at FWTT too. Trinidadian designer Robert Young sent every model down the ramp with green plants in sliver buckets   that were tagged with environmental and social messages.  St Lucian designer Queen Esther  wowed the crowd with her natural fiber line and  use of eco friendly jewellery made by   a conservationist.

But the Green Revolution did go much further. Each night patrons sat on chairs stacked with brochures that were not made of  recycled paper,  models walked the ramp under lights that were hardly energy conserving and  many designers failed to understand the nature of a collection making a series  of isolated garments that  didn't maximise their  fabric, their time or their money.  

Did 'live green, save the earth' message work? Yes and no. Many times at FWTT  it seemed like a lovely cliché, the question is how to get beyond it.

As a marketer, I think that taglines have to matter and  if a customer  can't  relate  your brand  to the whole  experience you’re offering then   it  is all just lip service. In other words  don't tell me your core values because you decided them in a meeting room. Instead allow me to feel your core values because you demonstrate them through my entire interaction with your brand. In that sense FWTT failed. 

Still the green revolution  lays a good foundation for  next year's week of fashion because there's  a second and not-so-obvious goal of a great tagline;  it  keeps  you  focused on  who and what you are trying to be. 

FWTT is not yet there but I have no doubt that they will be.