When a brand advertises, markets, or otherwise communicates a message to you it’s in fact making a promise. That company isn’t creating a campaign, website, print ad, or tv spot. Nope, they’re creating promises with their consumers/customers. Lately, I’ve been in several meetings and have take stock of several brand interactions I’ve had where there’s a clear gap between the promise being made and the ability to live up to that promise.

More specifically, I was in a meeting recently, where the brand architecture was essentially pointed to as being “optimistic” and not reality. However, even though it’s not reality yet, we should be leveraging it as the foundation for communication. In other words, even though they knew the product could not live up to how the product was going to be marketed, they wanted to do it anyway.

Huh? That’s like gas on a fire. If I send a blogger product X for review and in the communication to the blogger I describe the product as amazing, remarkable, the best, the gold standard, and sure to please – it better do all of those things. Because if it doesn’t, not only is my reputation tarnished with the blogger, the company/brand/product is going to get ripped to shreds.

BMW promises the consumer that when you buy one of their cars, you are getting the “Ultimate Driving Machine.” The foundation for that claim is “Independent. Unmistakable. Unique. Admittedly, we’re not the typical car company.” As a two time BMW owner and someone who worked on their business for 3 years, I can tell you two things about those statements:

1. When it comes to “driving” their is no substitute in their category. Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, etc. are all very nice cars, but they could never claim (well they shouldn’t) they are the “Ultimate Driving Machine.”
2. My expectations for customer service and mechanical service have always been underwhelming. When I see and hear that they aren’t the typical car company, my expectations are that ever facet of their business will be different than the norm.  The reality is, it isn’t.

Often I hear clients that operate a franchise model bemoan the inability to ensure consistency at each franchise location.  This often leaves me perplexed for several reasons.  But, primarily, it leaves me perplexed because I don’t understand why you’d spend millions of dollars to advertise one type of experience to generate millions of people coming to your store – only – to under-deliver on those messages and leave the consumer with a negative take on your brand.

Look, this is simple folks. In today’s rapidly evolving interactive world, if you break that promise people will know quickly. That’s a recipe for product, brand, and relationship disaster.  Please don’t try and pass off cat food as caviar, no matter how much the smell a like.

Long story short:

1. P&G hosted an event called Digital Hack Night.
2. The event was designed to immerse, educate, and demonstrate the power of digital marketing to it’s marketing directors
3. The brought in sharp minds like David Armano, Peter Kim, Kelly Mooney and leaders form Google, MySpace, Facebook also attended. Note, Twitter did not attend.
4. The backbone to the event was a contest to raise money for charity by selling t-shirts. The combination of P&G Marketing Directors, famous peeps, and leaders were split into 4 teams. Each team competed to see who could rake in the most cash.

That’s all I’m going to cover about the event. Other people have given it better and more thorough coverage. You can read about it here, here, here, and here.

I’ve found most “leaders” to rarely establish a serious position, rock the boat, or be controversial.  Instead they focus on being “politically correct.”  By politically correct, I mean not choosing a side – instead opting to find pros and cons with both sides.  Since no one else will ask the difficult questions, I felt I should.  That’s my style.

What I want to focus on is this quote from Peter Kim

At the end of the evening, P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard remarked that in the future, all employees should get involved in activating connections similar to what had just been witnessed.

I posted the following on Peter’s site:

Peter-
Nice recap. If the future is that all employees should be involved in activating their connections 3 things must happen:

1. Employees should be rewarded for the impact they make – this changes compensation structures
2. Personal brands must be embraced and supported; with rules needing relaxation so that employees aren’t be stifled – can a corporate company really embrace this?
3. Partners will need to be held accountable as well. – If employees are expected to do this, shouldn’t their agencies, packaging suppliers, etc.

At the and of the day the question I won’t to pose to the community (though few will actually answer) is at what point does this simply become just a very large pyramid scheme, that’s backed by one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world? Is this the future of marketing?

There’s been a lot of debate lately about personal brands. Specifically, the question has been raised about how important they are and if people should put their name (aka their brand) first or their companies. Make no mistake, the digital experts that were brought to Cincinnati for the event leveraged their personal brands big time.

P&G in effect is asking for people (albeit indirectly) to establish personal brands, grow the size of their virtual and real rolodexes, and leverage their personal brand in combination with their network size for the GREATER good of the company.

One part of me says, right on, EXACTLY. After all shouldn’t you support the company you work for? When I worked at ConAgra Foods, I traded Heinz Ketchup for Hunts and Nathan’s for Hebrew National. In general I embrace the brands I work on. I now work on Rite-Aid. You can be sure I’ll be getting my prescriptions there and not anyone else.

Here’s the million dollar question. Should employees, vendors, and partners be compensated for doing this or should it simply be part of the job?

Think about it. You are leveraging your personal network and brand for the greater good of your client and company. That’s not exactly in the job description It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it begs the question, no?

Let’s say I work for BMW and I convince 10 of my friends who were leaning towards Lexus to buy a BMW.  Let’s take a round number like $50,000 and call that the value of each car.  In effect, didn’t I generate $500,000 in sales for BMW?  Didn’t I do the job of the dealer, the ad agency, the TV spot, the web site, etc.?  Yet, in most cultures I’d never be compensated for extending myself.  What happens if person #2′s BMW has a boat load of problems.  It’s my reputation that gets sullied.  Remember, I convinced him to go BMW over Lexus.

This isn’t that far fetched.  Do you know how many people I got to switch to Peter Pan peanut-butter (subsequently people were pissed at me after Peter Pan announced it had salmonella) or choose Nikon over Canon when I worked on those brands?  100s if not 1000s.  If companies are going to want people to become brand advocates that establish brands, grow personal networks, and ultimately tap that network for the good of the company, there needs to be a change in how we compensate our employees.  At least that’s what I think.

Where do you stand?

MadMen is a show on AMC that’s centered around the advertising agency business. As AMC puts it, MadMen is “Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative AMC drama Mad Men follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising, an ego-driven world where key players make an art of the sell.” It’s a good show, a really great show. Here is a clip from Season 1.

Unfortunately, it seems like majority of companies are still buying advertising space based on demographics. Company X, which for the purposes of this argument is BMW, will buy space on show Y, which for the purposes of this conversation is MadMen, because people between the ages of A and B who make somewhere between M and R watch the show. If we assume that’s who’s watching the show, we wouldn’t take into account that a large portion of the viewing audience are advertising people. You know, people who work at agencies

If my hypothesis is correct and agency people are a big part of the audience, wouldn’t companies, like BMW raise the bar on the creative? Running the same creative they run on every other channel seems silly to me because the viewing audience is much more sophisticated. I’ve been taking note of the ads that are running during the episodes and assigning them letter grades from A – F. The average letter grade is a D. I also casually looked at the critical reviews of the ads that had reviews available, and the pundits seem to agree with me.

Aren’t these just wasted dollars? Why aren’t we being smarter about the ads we create? Shouldn’t we consider the audience we’re speaking to, the show we’re running on, and may other factors when creating ads. Well, I do. MadMen is the perfect test kitchen for ads. Where else can companies get free feedback from other agencies about their work?

C’mon people, we can be better. We can be smarter. We can make this work. We just need to think things out a little bit more.