Well, they did and I did. I ran to the train with recent purchase in hand, my mouth watering at the anticipation of the wonderful flavor and luscious mouth feel of Ciao Bella dulce de leche gelato. I’m a big fan of gelato and dulce de leche and of this brand in particular.

Sadly, when I started wolfing down (did I mention I was hungry?) the gelato, I was unpleasantly surprised by the quality of the product. It wasn’t sweet. Its texture was more grainy than velvety. It just wasn’t very good. I was quite disappointed because I had never had a bad experience with this brand before. So I decided to whine about it.

I took out my phone and tweeted:

albertoferrer Usually lovely Ciao Bella dulce de leche flavor gelato today not so much. Bland, a little rancid, even some ice cristals. Sigh.
8:39 PM Feb 4th from txt

About an hour later, a fellow fan of the Ciao Bella brand tweeted:

mindytweets @albertoferrer ohhh, fail!! Try the blackberry cabernet flavor, yum!
9:41 PM Feb 4th f rom UberTwitter in reply to albertoferrer

I got home and thought nothing more about the incident. That was until I had some free time the following week and checked my Twitter feed more closely. There I found this tweet, from the Ciao Bella folks:

CiaoBellaGelato @albertoferrer Oh NO! Sounds like a remelt issue. Please call our office or email info@ciaobellagelato.com and we will handle it. sorry
2:58 pm Feb 5th from TweetDeck in reply to albertoferrer

I was floored. These guys had not only picked up my tweet, but they had tentatively diagnosed the issue and responded with (1) a promise to make it right and (2) contact information. And that was done in less than one working day. I was also thrilled.

Following their instructions, I emailed the company, explaining the situation with the tweets above pasted into the body of the email. This was on a Wednesday afternoon. The next day I received an email reply from Justine DeRose at Ciao Bella.

She apologized for the incident, which clearly was not their fault (it was the retailer’s), explained in more detail what might have been the cause of the issue, and asked for the code at the bottom of the package so they could better look into the matter. She also offered a coupon for a free pint.

The explanation was great, as it directed any questions I might have about the product away from the product itself. Asking for the code on the package also was great because it suggested that they’d really look into the matter (“these people are serious about the quality of their gelato!” I thought). And of course the free pint coupon was just icing on the proverbial cake: unexpected and delightful.

I replied to the email saying that I no longer had the packaging but letting her know where I had made my purchase. She then asked for my address and mailed me the coupon. I received the free pint coupon this weekend.

Since this situation transpired, I have visited the Ciao Bella website several times (that’s where I was able to put a face to the name of the person at Ciao Bella who was actively engaged in resolving the issue), I have looked for stores that carry their product beyond the stores I usually frequent, and I even tried to buy a pint online. I’ve told the story to several people I know and they’re all impressed with how quickly Ciao Bella handled it, how positive the experience was, and how big an advocate for their brand I’ve become. And now I’ve written this post and will tweet about it.

Was that customer service? Was that marketing? That’s for another post. But from the perspective of a consumer, it doesn’t matter. It was done very well and it will pay off for Ciao Bella. Kudos to them and special thanks to Justine.

Update:
Within an hour of my tweeting the link to this post, Ciao Bella re-tweeted it with a thank you and responded here with a comment by Deborah Holt, their VP of Marketing.

Bones on Fox

Now, I realize that James Cameron is a big shot (there were two separate articles about him and the movie in the most recent issue of Wired magazine, for example), and that the movie is being released by Fox sibling 20th Century Fox, but really? It felt over the top to me. There were times where they could have stopped, having gotten their impressions and audience engagement, but instead they chose to go on and give us too much of a good thing.

Avatar Movie

Anyway, take a look at the show on the Fox website or on Hulu (it’s episode nine from season five, “The Gamer in the Grease”) and see what you think. Perhaps I’ve just lost it, but if it weren’t because I was able to fast-forward through the commercials, I would have watched more commercial messaging than program content. I’m all for product integration as a way to help pay for good content we get “for free” on television, but I’m also for restraint thereof.

As stated in the article, this is an interesting take on the current economic situation. Much has been written about the mistakes that have been made, about how we got to where we are now, etc. Little has been made of the learning from those mistakes or how to best lead an organization in less-than-rosy times. Here are the lessons:

Confront Reality Always question whether the “halo effect” of a business or business situation is blinding you to what lies on the horizon. —Herbert Henkel, chairman and CEO of Ingersoll Rand

At Board Meetings, Put Strategy Center Stage The board has been heavily involved in strategy formulation with me, and we have a better strategy because if it. —Bill Nuti, chairman and CEO of NCR

Be Transparent With Employees The only way to address uncertainty is to communicate and communicate. And when you think you’ve just about got to everybody, then communicate some more. —Terry Lundgren, chairman, president, and CEO of Macy’s

Be Transparent With Investors Our policy is: “If in doubt, communicate.” We always want to conduct our business with integrity and forthrightness. —Ron Sugar, chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman

Build And Protect The Culture Stay focused on culture, people, and values: it’s the area most likely to get compromised in this environment. —Eric Foss, chairman and CEO of Pepsi Bottling Group

Keep Faith With The Future If you don’t invest in the future and don’t plan for the future, there won’t be one. —George Buckley, chairman, president, and CEO of 3M

While there is much to be learned from each of these lessons or principles, a subset of them resonated the most with me. First is the notion of transparency and communication. Especially in touch times (but at all times, really) there is ample opportunity for rumor and innuendo to take over. Communication (even over-communication) with stakeholders is critical to pushing forth an agenda and keeping the team with their eye firmly on the ball. Yes, it’s difficult to remain focused on the task at hand if I’m worried about losing my job. But communications from leadership of the organization about what’s going on can go a long way towards making me comfortable about the situation and about the folks who are leading the company through the challenging environment.

Another favorite is the confronting of reality. Addressing head-on the challenges of the day, whatever they may be, is not only more efficient but also more effective. I’ve been in corporate situations where the reality of the day (the forest) has been ignored (or perhaps set aside) while management focuses on something else (the trees) and the results have been more painful than needed. Especially in tough times, leaders need to take a good hard look at what’s in front of them and confront that reality however different, unexpected, or chaotic it may be. Only then can the organization truly begin charting its course through the situation.

Last is the point about the culture. In difficult economic times, it can be easy to throw out elements of company culture, reject company values, and lose sight of the people as you seek to swiftly control costs, for example. These short-term-focused actions, however, will have a profound effect on the company long term. A company is not just its balance sheet and income statement. In fact, a company is its people, the values that bind them together, and the culture in which they thrive. Short-changing that in difficult times will do much harm and impede the very recovery that management is trying to effect.

As I read that while sitting on a local train (I had missed the express train by a few minutes, much to my chagrin), it struck me as clever copy and even placement (I think that Conill handles their creative while MV42 does their media). The creative ties in nicely to the placement and to the product benefit (although the more strict grammarians among us would have requested the copy read “ir en el expreso” as the correct way to phrase it). It works nicely, in any language. Here’s a bad picture of the ad.

Continental Airlines Hispanic OOH

What was more interesting to me, however, was the tagline. I had never read the Continental Airlines tagline in Spanish before. It’s “Trabajar con Empeño. Viajar con Pasión.” The English-language tagline for Continental is “Work Hard. Fly Right.” which supposedly came from their CEO during an speech to employees and it was adopted as the tagline for the company.

In English, the tagline never said much to me. It felt obvious that it was a non-consumer statement being slapped on ads. I don’t feel it communicates much to a consumer. However, in Spanish, the adaptation of the tagline works much better. It loosely translates to “(To) Work with Determination. (To) Fly with Passion.” First of all, the choice of words really resonates with me and I think with consumers in general.

The word “empeño” is particularly interesting here. It’s a great word in Spanish and it means so much. It encapsulates the concept of striving, working hard, determination, insistence, and making an effort. To me that is a much richer concept than plain “work hard.” Then there’s the word “pasión” that is so relevant to Hispanics, but also so much more human, warm, and emotional for consumers in general that the English-language “fly right” (what does that mean, anyway?), at least in my opinion.

So, kudos to Continental Airlines. If I was your target, you got me. And by the way, how about working on that English-language tagline a bit?

As I was getting closer to the office, I spotted another example of Hispanic-targeted OOH. This one was a Bud Light billboard for its Bud Light Lime flavor. What was interesting about it is that Lime was adapted to “limón” in Spanish. It’s not that “limón” is incorrect. Au contraire, it shows  deep undersanding of the target consumer.

In the countries from where most US Hispanics hail, the small green citrus fruit is called “limón” and the larger more-elongated yellow citrus fruit is called “lima.” Go figure. Still, kudos to Bud Light for picking up on that.

Instead of talking about how good leaders lead, or focusing on what makes great leaders, or anything like that, they looked at the opposite. Based on two research studies on executives and leaders, they examined those who failed and developed a list of the ten things most commonly missing in bad leaders. As they write, “every bad leader had at least one, and most had several.”

According to their work, the worst leaders:

• Lack energy and enthusiasm
• Accept their own mediocre performance
• Lack clear vision and direction
• Have poor judgment
• Don’t collaborate
• Don’t walk the talk
• Resist new ideas
• Don’t learn from mistakes
• Lack interpersonal skills
• Fail to develop others

The authors further note that the bad leaders they studies often were unaware of these behaviors.

This is interesting because the vast majority of the literature on leadership has been focused on the positive traits and behaviors of good leaders. This look at the flip side of the coin provides fresh perspective (even though some of the factors outlined above might seem somewhat obvious).

Being a good leader might be as much about exhibiting the good traits and behaviors as it is about not displaying the bad ones. Read the full article for the details.

1. How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It
2. Quiz: Are You a Grammar Geek?
3. 4 Tips for Writing Better Email
4. 10 Business Words to Ban
5. Why Is Business Writing So Bad?

Take a look. They are not that long but still can help improve anyone’s business writing.

While I can speak to the marketing budget slashing issue, that’s been done to death. There is ample evidence that the marketers with the stomach to power through a downturn and maintain (or increase) their marketing investments in times like these are the ones who profit handsomely when the business environment improves.

The other issue that gets my goat is the myopic shifting of multicultural business to a general market agency. I believe that generally to be a misguided decision that will backfire.

When making such moves, the marketers generally cite the savings that they will realize by combining multicultural and general market activities in the same agency. Some openly acknowledge that the quality of the work will suffer but still opt for the short-term savings in order to relieve the pressure put on them by their finance folks. Some others have been led to believe that the quality will be the same as it was with the multicultural agency (in some cases better!) and so to the marketer it seems like a no-brainer. What folly!

For the uninitiated, this is generally what happens:

• Step One: The client finance people issue an edict requiring marketers to reduce their expenses in agency compensation (some clients do that in parallel with overall budget cuts, while others do so as a “share-of-budget” exercise, keeping budgets flat year-over-year but reducing the percentage that is dedicated to compensating agencies.)
• Step Two: Marketers contact their agencies to let them know what will be required. Some contact all agencies, others start off with their “lead” (read: general market) agencies, where the bulk of the agency fee expenditures occur.
• Step Three: General market agencies, facing the prospect of revenue reductions, opt instead for manageable margin reductions and thus offer to take on the multicultural work for the same agency fee as in the previous year (or perhaps a bit more). It goes something like “Hey, instead of cutting our fee, how about we keep it flat to last year and instead we take on the multicultural work for no additional fee (or a very small fee)? That way, you save all those fees you’re now paying the multicultural shops.”

Now the client looks at the option of streamlining his or her life by working with one agency, having one scope discussion, paying one fee, having one meeting, etc. And on top of that, they save a bunch of money! It sounds like a dream. But it is more like a nightmare. Here are a couple of thoughts for marketers contemplating such a move.

1. Ask yourself how the general agency can do the multicultural work for no incremental fee (or a very small one). The work that was being done still needs to be done. If the work can just be absorbed by the general agency, that’s a tell-tale sign that either they have been overcharging or they will put a junior person with the appropriate last name or skin color on the multicultural portion of the business and call it a day (after all, the objective is a lower price tag, not good multicultural marketing). Maybe both.
2. Ask the general agency to provide proof of the quality of the work they say they’ll deliver. Have they done multicultural work before? Are they a leader in their space? Is that their specialty? Would they know good multicultural work if they saw it? Don’t discount the importance of quality work in trying economic times. Remember that alienating a multicultural audience will cost you dearly and for the long term.
3. Don’t cut the multicultural agencies out of the conversation. Share the issues openly with all stakeholders and get everyone working together to arrive at a workable solution that achieves your cost reduction goals without gutting any one area in your marketing plan. If you have to reduce overall compensation costs by X%, see how the whole team can share the burden. (Perhaps efficiencies can be achieved by consolidations in production or by sharing resources, instead of reducing intellectual capital).

All this notwithstanding, should you choose to follow the silly notion of moving business from agency to agency, do the right thing and offer the option to everyone. That is, if you’re considering moving your multicultural work to the general market agency, also entertain the option of bringing your general market work to the multicultural shop.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see the multicultural agency, experienced in working with constrained budgets and compensation, being the best option for the overall account. They can provide the same assurances of quality on the general market work as the general agencies do on the multicultural work, and they will certainly do it for less.

Even before the US economy took its swan dive into the commode, corporate sites targeting Hispanics were few and far between. Never mind the research supporting the need for companies to have Hispanic market sites up and running, even with full transactional capabilities. Never mind the research finding that Hispanics are going online in droves and finding precious little content tailored to them. Many clients still resisted and remained general market, English-only, on the Web. This was the case even for marketers with support for Hispanic advertising. Imagine that, investing in advertising to the Hispanic market, while alienating the same consumers online.

Today’s economic realities make things even tougher. As marketing budgets get cut left and right (enough has been written about the folly of cutting marketing investment in recessionary times, so I won’t go into it here), multicultural marketing budgets commonly find themselves in the crosshairs of short-term-thinking clients. Keeping the Hispanic website becomes a line item that is often too easy to cut as companies reduce headcount in internal support staff (who’ll manage the Hispanic site now?) and overall marketing communications targeting this population (would they prioritize the website over running a few more television spots?).

Especially in these tough times, clients need to reconsider any thought of cutting the support for their Hispanic-targeted corporate website. Here are a few reasons why, some of which I alluded to above:

1. Hispanics are online. According to comScore, there were 20 million Hispanics online last month. Brands should be there too. Marketers should not alienate Hispanic consumers on the Web by providing only a general market site.
2. Hispanics who are online tend to be better-educated and have higher incomes and better credit, making the Web a bit of a filter for the cream of the crop of Hispanic consumers. Talk about efficiency!
3. There is a dearth of Hispanic-targeted content online, making any marketer’s content stand out much more than in the general market, where there’s plenty of me-too content to go around.
4. Hispanic consumers often go online to learn about the products and services they seek, even if they end up completing the transaction in offline channels. Lacking a website, where will these consumers go to get the information they need to make a purchase decision?
5. Analyzing server logs from their Hispanic-targeted sites can provide companies valuable insights into consumer behavior. Product preference, information needs, purchase behavior, and more can be gleaned from “watching” consumers on the site.
6. Marketers who cut their Hispanic sites may find their Hispanic consumers more easily swayed by the competition, which by maintaining a robust online presence for Hispanics, sent the clear message that the group is important to them.

In summary, I would strongly advise clients to not only forget about cutting Hispanic-targeted websites, but to increase the support (e.g., funding, resources) behind them. It’s an investment that will pay off handsomely in more business from this very attractive population.

Although at times the writing is uninspired and somewhat self-serving (the first third, for example, can be skipped), the authors make some interesting points about how advertising and DM have evolved in recent years. Traditionally, advertising was used as “air cover” or to “soften the market” by marching into the marketplace battleground with broadly distributed messages aimed at piquing the interest of consumers. Direct marketing, then, followed advertising, and targeted those interested folks with offers to convert that interest into actual sales.
Advertising was considered “top of the funnel” and direct marketing “bottom of the funnel” (referring to the purchase funnel). Advertising was supposed to hook them and direct marketing was supposed to get them onto the boat. Advertising affected their attitudes while direct marketing affected their behavior. You get the point.

As the authors argue in their piece, these days there is no such thing as a linear purchase cycle. There is no predictable, projectable flow of consumers from one stage (Awareness) to another (Interest) to another (Desire) to another (Action). Consumers today can go online and research brands and products on their own terms as opposed to those of marketer’s. And they do it much faster than before.

Where I disagree with these fine gentlemen is in the assertion that the two disciplines are the same. They are not. I agree that they are intertwined and that they no longer can work sequentially (but rather must work concurrently). I agree that direct marketing must play a much larger role in the marketing of a brand or product and that the role must be played throughout, not just at the end. But the same thing they are not.

The article discusses new roles for direct marketing (other than the traditional “closing the deal”). Direct marketing can improve a brand’s ability to listen to a consumer, react to the consumer, and learn from the consumer. Direct marketing allows a brand to personalize experiences and respond to a consumer’s needs more quickly and personally. Direct marketing allows a brand to take the conversation to the one-person level. All these activities and interactions contribute to the consumer’s perception of the brand and are therefore branding.

What the authors fail to address (and perhaps this is because they don’t want to get into this
conversation in public) is whether brand advertising per se is needed anymore. In this environment where (a) brand-consumer interactions are multiplied and accelerated, (b) more and more of those interactions are controlled by the consumer rather than the brand, and (c) consumers increasingly turn to peers and other “civilians” for information (and the truth) about brands, do we really need traditional brand advertising?

Traditionalists would tell you that people feel good about Nike or Apple because someone (marketers) told them how to feel. That they are good products, yes, but that all the goodwill surrounding strong brands was started by a marketer showering the masses with messaging painting the picture they wanted to be seen; telling the story they wanted to tell, the way they wanted it to be told.

From where I’m sitting, though, all that and much more can be accomplished by direct marketing, and it can be done in a more measured and managed manner, resulting in reams of actionable data that can be further leveraged in support of the brand. Perhaps that’s what the authors mean when they say that branding and response are the same. But I would say it differently. To me, branding is now just another function of direct marketing. Because doing brand advertising without a direct marketing framework these days feels irresponsible and dangerously disengaged from the real goal of all this money being spent: building the brand’s business by selling more.