It's been some time since the last update on my little Terra Chips interaction. I can't say that there's anything really new to report. I couldn't seem to justify to myself the time and effort to record a phone call to their customer service team given the other important things to which I've had to attend. (Links to the previous posts, in case they’re needed: I, II, III, IV, V, VI - Fail.) And in case I you're still wondering, the Terra Chips folks have still not responded to me, nor do I expect they will.

That said, I wanted to post to say thank you to the folks who offered comments and posts on their blogs. As I said repeatedly, this isn't some kind of watershed experiment. I had no pretentions about breaking through some profound barrier. I simply wanted to point out how pervasively diseased marketing has become. Terra Chips is a great brand. They make a great product. They are simply one of many—in fact, one of the overwhelming majority—of consumer-facing businesses that fail utterly at creating a genuine relationship with their customers. The reason for this state of affairs is simply that mass marketing as we’ve known it since Oyster Bay—indeed since Gutenberg—has reached the end of its utility. I’ve been wanting to post about exactly this, and I have in the past. I’ve got more to say about it, but that will have to wait for another post which I intend to give a snappy title something along the lines of, “Marketing Can Kiss My Ass.”

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, VII" »

One trip to the grocery and one blown PSU later and I can finally offer a final post in the wait for some response from the Terra Chips people. I've got a brand new bag of Lay's Kettle Cooked Original Potato Chips. They're good, although honestly, they're not as good as the Terra. At least I could easily open the bag. (Again, if you haven't read the other posts in this series, here are some links: I, II, III, IV, V. In a nutshell, their bag is hard to open.)

What's the upshot of all of this? Not much. I do know this much: Google is crazy ubiquitous. Google will index this post. It will parse the following sentences. Terra Chips Consumer Relations failed to relate to this consumer. Terra Chips failed to respond to a legitimate complaint. Terra Chips ignored a consumer that was an admitted fan of their product who happened to have a small criticism. Terra Chips failed to prove their claim that they care about their customers' questions and comments.

I'm interested to call Terra Chips Consumer Relation and see if they every actually received my emails. They're located in Colorado and I'm in Missouri. Based upon the information I've read, there are no state laws that would require more than one party to a phone conversation to give consent in order to record that conversation. If I can find the time and setup the equipment, I'll call them and publish the recording here.

To all the folks that manage the Terra Chips brand and their Consumer Relations group, I'm sorry this went down this way. I was really pulling for you guys to get in the conversation. I was prepared to give the Terra Chips brand full marks for their gumption. I don't want to just trash the brand because they've got a few things right--like they make a great chip. But they definitely missed an opportunity here. And they've demonstrated the self-serving nature of their "contact us" page. And they've made liars of themselves inasmuch as they suggested that they care about my questions and comments and then never actually addressed them.

So there are just crumbs in the bag of chips. It's late Sunday night here. I'd like to give the Terra Chips folks one more business day to respond. (If you don't know the story, you can view the posts leading to this one: I, II, III, IV.)

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, V" »

Matt offers an excellent suggestion about how to draw a line in the ground potato chip crumbs as it were. As he suggests, there's no particular science to deciding how long one should wait for a response from a company before you determine that they're not being entirely honest when they say they care about your questions and comments. My writing would also seem to demonstrate that I have a hard time determining when to end a sentence, but that is another matter entirely.

Taking Matt's suggestion, I shall arbitrarily decide that the Terra Chips Consumer Relations team isn't particularly interested in my comments and questions as of the day we finish the remaining chips in the bag and go buy more (perhaps other) chips. Given that half the bag of chips is now inside my vacuum, it shouldn’t be long. Given that I’m having a mild attack of diverticulitis (don’t ask), I’ll leave it up to my wife and kids to consume said chips.

What’s more, Matt has been kind enough to offer support of my chip foibles over at the Integrity Corporation blog. Given Google’s willingness to index anything and its love of all things blog, I’m not surprised to find my post comes up at the top of this search and it is the second result for this search.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, IV" »

Another day goes by with no response from Terra Chips Consumer Relations. (If you haven’t read the first post on the subject, you can go here and do so. ) I'd like to think the lack of response is not because their conception of consumer relations includes ignoring the consumer for two days. I'd like to think it is because they're really busy and just haven't gotten around to responding. That’s my hope, because I still like the product. It really does taste great. Get a bag for yourself and note first how difficult it is to open but then how good the chips are.

I really don't expect anything from them. I don't need free chips or anything like that. Mostly, I'd just like to know that they heard me. I don't expect them to change for me, but I would hope they could at least do me the courtesy of offering some explanation for my experience. Maybe it’s the intended behavior of the package. Maybe they’re trying to say, “hey it’s hard work to get the bag open which is done out of respect for how great the chips are—y’know, like ya gotta work for it.” Whatever the reason for the packaging and for the nature of the contact form, I can’t see how it would be particularly onerous for them to explain it to me. I did give them my address after all.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, III" »

As per Skye's suggestion, I'm creating a new post for each update to the Terra Chip saga. So far nothing after an entire work day. I'm starting to wonder if my questions and comments are so very important to them after all. If I get something else, I'll pass it along.

So bigwidesky is in a holding pattern. Things have changed and will change again. Such is the way of things. As an incredibly brilliant person just suggested to me today, "I know I will not get out of this life alive..." That obviously means what it means, but perhaps less obviously it suggests that the only constant is the lack of constancy. How's that for a self-referential paragraph, eh?

But I'm not interesting in digging into all of that right now. I'll be saying more about bigwidesky shortly. Right now I'm employing my potato chip greased fingers to clack out this little experiment. It's an experiment that has been tried many times before. I'm not going to dig up specific links at the moment, but you can go to the consumerist and elsewhere and find other things like what I'm about to blog. But hey, I'm in a potato chip induced altered state of consciousness.

To be brief, I had a hard time opening a bag of Terra Chips. In particular, Terra Kettles. This isn't the first time. So I should have known better, but I'm in my office and I don't have scissors, so I applied the requisite pressure to actually the open the bag; which is to say the same amount of force necessary to move the Earth to a new orbit. Needless to say, my hapless self got chips all over the place. I decided I should let the people who make these chips know that while the chips are good, they are packaged in an armored truck.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips" »

I have to say I’ve been disappointed with the way the Republican presidential candidates have been handling the YouTube/CNN debate. When I first heard that only Ron Paul and John McCain were committed to appearing and how Romney wasn’t gonna answer no questions from no damn snowman, I immediately thought of Henry Jenkins.

Continue reading "An Humanizing Technology" »

John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

Continue reading "Perceiving The Whole From The Parts" »

I don't know why I haven't posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here's the gist:

Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.

No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm's length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

Continue reading "It's the Humanity, Stupid!" »

The Consumerist has a post about some excellent customer service from SmartBargains.com.

Every ad agency should be making every attempt to sell some kind of customer service initiative with every campaign. An authentic interaction. If the marketing is going to tell a compelling story, it had better be congruent with the customer's experience when something inevitably goes wrong.

We're back on Broad Street. Morning engagements kept me from the first two presenters, and I've come into the middle of a presentation on "Entertainment." The session is "curated" by Lee Maicon; Bald Guy, and Head of Planning at StrawberryFrog. The program doesn't contain the names of the three panelists. One of the panelists is a particularly smart cat who is speaking about narrative and meaning. He (the smart dude) just walked us through some movie clips - one from Kurosawa's "Ran", and one from the Matrix. I haven't been able to determine what exactly they're trying to tell us, but I've only been here for a few minutes.

Continue reading "futuremarketing redux - electric boogaloo" »

I'm sitting here in the "Downtown Ballroom," 41 Broad Street, NY, NY for the futuremarketingsummit. As of fifteen minutes ago, Scott Goodson was to begin his keynote. It has yet to begin. Okay, well he's just starting now. Technical difficulties with projectors and computers were repeatedly met with Scott's opening line, "Welcome to the Future."

Continue reading "futuremarketingsummit liveblog" »

A recent article in B-To-B Magazine shows how many publishing companies are getting into territory normally handled by ad agencies. The expanded offerings include online and word of mouth marketing services. This is getting traction in the business publication sector but consumer oriented pubs are going in that direction too. The trend appears to be that media companies are acquiring agencies with expertise in web site design & development, word of mouth marketing and PR.

Continue reading "Publishers Expanding Their Turf" »

Ahhhh, the wager is on. Can web 2.0 make money for companies? Will people continue to work for free?

If you believe Nicholas Carr, people will NOT work for free forever. The economy simply hasn’t figured out how to charge for the model yet.

If you side with Yochai Benkler and the gift economy, people will contribute for free for as long as they are appreciated and moving toward the perceived greater good. Or, in his exact words, the key is:

"managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker"

I like him.

Continue reading "So the hacker said to the economist…" »

Brand Noise has a post about a "hot new idea shop" called Fahrenheit 212. The post links to a BusinessWeek article about the firm. From that article:

Clients think of the firm as a way to make long-shot bets without having to use their own research and development resources. "Samsung is a lean organization. We can't afford to have people coming up with ideas that don't work," says Chief Marketing Officer Gregory Lee. "The people at Fahrenheit are very helpful because they are working on ideas that can fail--it allows you to experiment a bit." What's more, Fahrenheit ties much of its compensation to the success of the product, making it an even safer bet.

A very accomplished, well-known and respected ad guy spoke in St. Louis on Friday. I was in the audience. He was singing the praises of the Mark Ecko/Air Force One stunt. I asked him if the inauthenticity of the stunt (ie. that wasn't really Air Force One) might make peeps feel like they'd been had.

He responded to the effect that it wasn't inauthentic because it fit the brand.

I was disappointed to hear the lackluster results of an ad campaign I found to be clever, on target and different than other competitors. The ad was for a drug called Rozerem, a sleep aid by drug manufacturer Takada. The drug, despite $100 million ad spend ranks 6th in its category; far behind category leaders Ambien and Lunesta and even trailing two generic brands. Check out Brandweek’s full article for more details.

So now you have to ask the following: “Was the concept wrong? Was the message wrong? Is the product inferior to its competitors? Was its late entry into the category too big of an obstacle to overcome?” I can come up with a bunch more.

Without knowing all the details I have to speculate. I think the ads are well concepted and executed as previously stated. But perhaps the product is to blame. The article references that although the drug helps those with sleeping disorders fall asleep faster, they often wake up in the middle of the night. Perhaps they succeeded in capturing first time users but due to this shortcoming, those users didn’t refill their prescriptions and requested another brand. This combined with their late entry into the market could prove to be too big of an obstacle to overcome. And if this is true, and users aren’t repeating, the drug will die out in the next couple years. It would be nice to know what percentage of first time users refilled thier prescriptions and how that compares to industry standards.

This is where some consumer generated feedback, through a forum or blog would be very advantageous. Instead of speculating, they can gather ongoing feedback, both from consumes and perhaps even physicians. If what they learn is that the product is inferior, then guess what – cut your losses now and go back to the lab and improve the product. Put the money in R&D and save the money marketing the product as is. In my opinion, these kinds of web based tools need to be part of every campaign in some shape or form. The days of a well planned out campaign that would run for a couple years are over. You have to learn and adjust as you go.

Ah, the rules of marketing keep changing. Let's see what happens to Rozerem over the next 24 months.

Daniel over at Organic's Three Minds blog has a post about Paul English's gethuman.com. Basically, gethuman.com is about trying to get companies to improve their phone support. "Be Human" is our mantra at bigwidesky, and things like this redound to my belief that being human is a meme whose time has come.

An inevitable debate is taking place around the nature of the marketing. John Moore, at his excellent blog, Brand Autopsy, has been a recent party to the discussion. He offers this edited footage of David Jones, global CEO of Euro RSCG speaking at a recent AdAge clambake.

Continue reading "The Nature of Marketing Revolution" »

I had a meeting this morning with a counterpart at a mid-size well established PR firm. We were discussing some of the work our company was doing for several clients. One in particular that was of interest to her involved helping our client to revamp a key executive's presentation content and style. I recommended the blog Presentation Zen to her when she inquired into some of the resources we utilized in developing our approach. I had forgotten what a great blog that Garr Reynolds has.

One of the things we have been preaching to all of our clients is to communicate in a way that is less autistic and more human. Many of the mediums we recommend have to do with applications for the Internet, as it allows more of a two way dialogue. But I had forgotten about how powerful a good presentation can be. It’s an opportunity to make a connection with your audiences, and potentially start an ongoing relationship with them. Unfortunately this opportunity is lost with many companies. They look at it solely as a way to push out information about their company or pitch their products and services.

As Garr points out in a recent post Presentations and Word of Mouth Marketing should play hand in hand. Giving your audiences something of value and providing a way for them to connect with you and your company goes a long way in fueling positive word of mouth. Direct them to a blog created around the topic being presented, share additional information and welcome feedback and dialogue. This has the added benefit of making it easy for them to share information about your company with their piers.

Think of presentations as an opportunity to build a new relationship and start a conversation. The end of the presentation is the beginning of the relationship, not the end of a tactic.

Russell Davies recently posted the results of his “what will marketing become” poll. This reminded me that it’s been awhile since I posted the introduction to my little exegesis on the future of marketing, so I figured I’d best finish off this second piece. The top two winners of his poll were especially inspiring in this pursuit. Here goes:

I’ve long had the sense that marketers—especially the “stars” of the field—constitute something like a “prelacy of cool.” I think I extracted this idea from some Emigre essay I read like eight years ago. The essay in question isn’t available on their site, and I can’t recall the issue of the magazine in which it appeared, but it was of a piece with other of their essays in one respect; it decried the ostensible “co-opting of cool” which commercial interests visit upon the otherwise vital, dynamic art of the social vanguard. In a move that surely evoked both the adoration and egoic ire of the Emigre coterie, this essayist denominated the marketers whom execute this diabolism as, “Antinomian (Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia).” I admit, I thought it was pretty clever. Which is why I’m stealing it.

Continue reading "Integral Marketing, Part II - Antinomian Marketing" »

So this is a blog. And a rather new one at that. Acting under the assumption that a blog is the proper venue for tempest-in-a-teapot grandiloquence, I intend now to unwind my narrative on new marketing. It will shake out into a number of parts, but I must to warn you now, fair reader: I have a penchant for a kind of looping, lateral storytelling which some (the lawyers want me to warn people with epilepsy) might find, well, obnoxious. So you’ve been warned and all that.

Continue reading "Integral Marketing, Part I - Exordium" »