Guy Laliberté has always had his head among the stars. But all this week, information pills the French-Canadian founder of Cirque du Soleil – and #562 on the Forbes list of wealthiest people – is actually circling the earth as a paid tourist aboard the International Space Station. And true to form, he’s using the opportunity to do a bit of “over-the-top” showmanship. Unfortunately, Laliberté didn’t match his lofty ambitions with the same sophistication, taste, and branding savvy he’s usually shown on Earth. Maybe it’s the lack of oxygen…
In space, nobody can hear your eyes rolling: Here's Laliberté sitting in the coolest place any human could ever be, with three very lame words on his shirt.
The event: stars will align tomorrow night
On Friday, October 9th at 8:00 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) Laliberté will be hosting a Webcast from space in support of his ONE DROP Foundation.
But in brief, the Webcast will pull together material from 14 cities around the world, and feature contributions from such luminaries as Al Gore, David Suzuki, and Salma Hayek, as well as performances by U2, Shakira, and, wait for it… Guy Laliberté himself performing from the International Space Station.
However, much to the disappointment of Cirque fans around the planet, he won’t be stiltwalking, eating fire, or even playing accordion (which, unlike terrestrial billionaires, he can actually do).
He’ll be reading poetry.
And you thought there was no gravity in space!
Before we get too critical, let it be known we think the cause he’s supporting is a great one.
This is what the event Web site says about the purpose of his mission (and we’ll ignore the clunky copy writing for the moment):
Laliberté’s mission in space is dedicated to making an impact on how water, our most precious resource, is protected and shared. And he will be applying tools he has used so well for most of his life to bring about change: arts and culture.
Information about our world’s water-related issues will be conveyed using a singular poetic approach. The messages he will transmit from the ISS will build awareness for ONE DROP Foundation initiatives, its objectives and dream of “Water for all, all for water.”
Good on you Guy, for using your media exposure for a good cause. We at Beg to Differ envy and admire your incredible chutzpah for reaching so high in pulling all this together.
But sad to say, there’s a “leak in the capsule” on this one.
See if you can find the problem in the image below:
Hint: the problem here ain't the smiling bald guy - or maybe it is...
Houston (Montreal, Moscow, etc.), we have a problem:
One of the dumbest, most pretentious names ever.
And the event’s subtitle doesn’t help: “Moving Stars and Earth for Water”.
Sorry Guy. It’s awkward in English. It’s pointless in French. It’s self-defeating as a brand strategy. And it’s totally counter to the taste and sophistication you’ve always applied to Cirque.
And worst of all, it focuses away from the parts of your mission that are really cool and worthy of attention:
Clean Water for earth! The wonder of space travel! A circus guy in space!
Instead it focuses on the lame (and painfully self-indulgent) parts of the picture:
Poetry reading! That mushy word “social”! Our sneaking suspicion that this may have more to do with your ego than water!
So Guy, next time you go to space, call me okay?
A branding expert could help you figure this stuff out before you blow millions of dollars making it all look like one big vanity project … or maybe at least help you make it look less like one.
One easy approach I would have suggested would be to call this whole project the “ONE DROP Clean Water for Earth Mission” and focused all your energies on building that one brand.
But that’s just one way we could have approached this. So seriously Guy. Call me next time. You can reach me here.
This is a message from one geek to another. I was raised on computers as a teenager in the mid 80’s, capsule and have been on the Internet since before browser technology made it easy for everyone in the 90’s, website like this the question seems pretty straightforward: “what is a browser?” But in April, when Google staffers from the Chrome browser team asked that question of people in New York’s Times Square, they were shocked with what they found out.
Less than 8% of people interviewed knew what a browser was
It isn’t scientific at all, but it makes the point very strongly. You can hear people struggling to distinguish between a search engine, an operating system, office software, and a browser.
And the results are repeatable as you can see in this video from Rotterdam (Dutch with English commentary) – which means we also can’t dismiss the people in the Google video as just dumb Americans / New Yorkers / etc. Dutch people are pretty smart – and Dutch Canadians even more so (editor’s note: may be some bias here).
The Googlers were trying to figure out how to get people to switch to the Google Chrome browser, but they couldn’t even start the conversation because most normal Internet-using humans don’t even know what a browser is.
To their credit, Google has now gone back to basics with a simple site called www.whatbrowser.org that breaks it down for the average human (if they care enough to visit).
The results seem incredible to me (because I’m a geek)
As a geek, I naturally assume that because I know what a browser is, so does everyone else, right? And if they don’t, they must be uneducated, luddites, or just totally out of touch. I’m like the mechanic who assumes that everyone knows what a catalytic converter is – because we all drive cars that have them.
But it’s not true. Most people don’t know because they don’t care what the technology is called. They just want to perform their daily tasks and would prefer the technology to be as invisible as possible.
Three problems this example highlights for branders
I coach executives and companies on sharpening their elevator pitches – 30-second verbal descriptions of their companies or products. And these are smart people too. But one of the first problems we almost always have to overcome is this:
Problem 1: We assume that our listeners know more about our subject area than they actually do.
They don’t. I think it’s because we don’t want to insult the intelligence of the listener by explaining things that seem obvious to us. So we jump straight in at the deep end, using all of the same catch phrases and jargon that we use with internal colleagues.
I catch myself doing this all the time when talking about some obscure brand strategy model, and then have to consciously take a few steps back before I lose my audience.
Problem 2: The audience doesn’t want to seem stupid, so they won’t interrupt and reveal their ignorance.
Just because they’re nodding their head doesn’t mean they get it. Find ways to figure out where they are on the learning curve and help them along it – in terms that make sense to them.
All of which leads to:
Problem 3: If your audience never gets past basic understanding, you’ll never get to the next level.
Forget about “positioning”, “marketing” and “brand awareness”. Especially forget about “sales”. If they don’t have a category for you in their brain, they’re not buying.
It’s been a tough week here at Beg to Differ. It started with good food, find which is good, but then we broke up with Intel, mourned the loss of the Saturn brand, and today, we have to talk about another tragedy: civil war. Yes, I’m talking full on, brother-against-brother warfare. And the war-dogs are already unleashed. Today our old friend Starbucks is starting taste tests of a brand new product against… wait for it… their own product.
The “Big Bucks” thinks this is a good idea. We beg to differ…
Let the divisive, internal warfare begin! Starbucks chooses an apt metaphor for its self-defeating taste test campaign. But they forget the old saying: "Nobody wins a civil war."
The new Product: Starbucks VIA Ready Brew
Apparently, this coffee master has already chosen sides for the battle to come...
On Wednesday morning, I was at a business meeting in a Starbucks, when the store’s chipper “coffee master” came over to offer us a sample of some frothy sweet coffee stuff. “Great.” I thought, another example of “Lethal Generosity. I must blog about this.”
But then I noticed she was wearing an orange apron, not the traditional green, and a strange new logo was there in the middle with the name of a Canadian passenger rail service on it.
That’s when she started her spiel: “Starbucks VIA is our new instant coffee. But it’s really good. come back on Friday for our taste test and you’ll see that it tastes just as good as our regular coffee…” She went on to explain that this was real Starbucks coffee processed using a super-secret process. Then she gave a very enthusiastic review of her own experience using wine-tasting language about “floral notes” “slight acidity” dark and full-bodied presentation”. But the whole time I was thinking:
Starbucks is selling INSTANT coffee?!?!
Now I admit, part of me was also thinking: “Hmm. Instant coffee, eh? Maybe this instant coffee does taste just as good. Maybe I should give this new instant coffee a try.” So congratulations Starbucks, you got me thinking about your new product, and I’ll even go try some. So as a product launch campaign, you win.
And Starbucks desperately needs a win these days. Their brand value has been deflating under competition from McDonald’s, Duncan Donuts, Tim Hortons, and a host of very smart local shops – like Ottawa’s Bridgehead (where I’m writing this post) leading to “daring” moves like the “15th Avenue” coffee-shop concept. But Instant Coffee takes the cake.
Reasons this is a bad idea for Starbucks
1) Instant coffee is the antithesis of real coffee
As I’m thinking about this new product, the term “Instant Coffee” is going through my head and I’m picturing the stale, foul-smelling crystals that are usually your last resort when you need caffeine but ran out of the real stuff. It’s like drinking home-brew wine at a party because the good stuff is gone. Or using canned Spam because you ran out of real meat. It doesn’t matter how good it is: it’s still home brew / Spam / a non-real product / a pale shadow of the real thing.
Starbucks built its brand by creating a new product category: premium coffee with an air of sophistication, taste, and care. That is, we pay extra for real coffee, really lovingly prepared by real people in a real place that is really dedicated to that product. You’ll often hear people at an office say: “No, not coffee-maker coffee. Let’s go out for a real coffee.”
2) Instant coffee devalues the Starbucks experience
The Starbucks store is not a coffee-buying place, it’s a place where real humans commune around the centerpiece of coffee. By saying “now you can make instant coffee at home and it actually is a Starbucks coffee,” you are implicitly saying that the Starbucks in-store experience is less important, easier to replicate, and worth less.
But don’t they already sell Starbucks-branded coffee-makers in store and can’t you get big bags of Starbucks-branded beans at your local Costco? Yes, and those also devalue the Starbucks brand in the same way. One or two is a stretch, too many and you break.
Again, I don’t care how good any given product may be. Starbucks brand managers should never, ever allow anyone in their organization to say anything they offer is equal to a real Starbucks experience – which is the in-store experience.
3) The name “VIA” is not terrible. But not strong enough to stand on its own.
Good points: the name is short, punchy, easy to spell and pronounce, and it looks great in big capital letters on a poster or product logo.
But two big problems: A) in English, “via” is not a noun, so it isn’t natural to say “drink a VIA”, and 2) because it appears after “Starbucks”, it will always be fighting for attention with the more familiar name – a battle VIA will inevitably lose.
4) “Ready Brew” is a dud as a category descriptor.
If you’re launching a product in a category like instant coffee that has a low perceived-value, but you’re trying to say “this is better / different / real”, do what Dove has always done. Don’t call yourself soap; call yourself a “Beauty Bar”.
It would have been smart for Starbucks to create a strong new category that has a name that implies higher value and sophistication. As in, “this isn’t Instant at all, this is (insert term here)”. Starbucks has already done this with their cup sizes. We may roll our eyes ordering a Tall, Grande, or Vente, but it works. It makes them seem like more than just a cup of Joe
“Ready Brew” fails on all counts. It sounds even cheaper than “Instant Coffee”, and doesn’t have enough character to replace that term.
5) A taste test is a no win battle for Starbucks
The call to arms. The internal battle begins today.
And finally, back to the wars. The problem with a civil war is this: it doesn’t matter who is right, and it doesn’t matter who wins, when two armies from the same place fight each other on their own territory, things get broken. Badly.
I can see two possible outcomes for the Starbucks brand of the taste tests:
A) The new product loses: in this case, Starbucks ends up looking silly, and the new product either tanks or manages to hobble along. Worst case, it tanks like New Coke and becomes a buzz-word for corporate hubris. This may give the Starbucks brand a small lift as people rally around “classic”, but the damage will be greater than the gain.
B) The new product wins: In this case, Starbucks has a popular new product that ends up undercutting the value of the brand with every package sold.
As I said: no win.
Thoughts for brand managers:
Are you creating your own internal civil wars by pitting your brands against your own offerings?
Is that new product launch strategy going to benefit the product at the expense of the corporate brand?
Is there an opportunity for a house brand or an endorsed brand strategy to put some distance between you and your new product?
Is someone speaking up for your customers and for the brand in your organization? If not, maybe time to get some help.
More reading:
The Motley Fool describes the civil war effect brilliantly in This May Be Starbucks’ Dumbest Move Ever. They make the suggestion that Starbucks should run taste tests against competitors’ coffee. So if Starbucks Ready Brew wins, they can say “see, even our instant coffee is better than their real stuff.”
Street interviews in New York caused local blog Gothamist to declare, “Starbucks Instant Coffee Instantly Hated By New York.”
BNET joins the pile-on, with some Brand Management 101 (“How to Blow a Turnaround”), asking: “[H]ow does Via stop the market share erosion to McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts? How does it bring customers back to Starbucks? Why didn’t the marketing geniuses at Starbucks compare Via to competitors’ fresh brewed coffee? At least that might have made some sense.”
So yesterday, purchase while Beg to Differ was breaking up with the Intel brand, ed we got sad news about another old flame: Saturn is dead. Penske threw in the towel on its attempt to revitalize the brand, recipe and GM is finally shutting Saturn down. We’re feeling sad about that today. We remember when Saturn was promising to be “A Different Kind of Company; A Different Kind of Car.”
As you may have guessed from our name, we like “Different”…
(above) The home page of the innovative "ImSaturn Network" community Web site. Everything looks different... except the cars... and apparently the end of the story...
You can read the whole sad Saturn history at Wikipedia. We’re going to focus on the Saturn brand, and how the promise changed over time, then died, and what brand managers can learn from it.
“I’m sure if everything I read is true, I won’t be disappointed”
Somewhere out there, this third grade teacher from a 1992 Saturn ad (below) must be a bit down today as well. In it, she says she read about Saturn, and makes a personal connection when workers at the company read her letter. If you ever cared about Saturn like us, you have to watch this (Spoiler Alert: it’s really sad in retrospect).
Different worked… for a while.
And I’m sure she was satisfied, for a while. For her, and for the rest of us that were rooting for the “different” approach from the auto industry, Saturn succeeded at building 1) a “Different Kind of” brand promise, 2) a “Different Kind of” corporate mentality, 3) “Different Kind of” retail experience (no haggling), and 4) a “Different Kind of” tribe of devoted followers. They really did. The vestiges of those things are still around.
For example, Saturn has been much better than most other companies at embracing and building community online. Their fan site ImSaturn u r 2 is really engaging, and their marketing team really gets Social Media. A couple months ago, Beg to Differ was shocked and delighted when @tomfolger and a couple of Saturn marketing folks popped in to a Twitter #Brandjam to correct us when Saturn positioning came up.
Unfortunately the vehicles themselves, the “Different Kind of Car” was only ever marginally different from other cars. But the service commitment became legendary, and at least the cars looked just different enough that you could spot a “Saturn” on the road. If only they had built on their differentness…
But that’s where the story turns sour.
The big problem was, the “Different Kind of Company” was always beholden to the corporate logic of GM – a very un-different automotive behemoth. So as the Saturn competed more and more with GM core brands, and sales never quite matched expectations, GM had two options:
Option A: Think like a bean counter = differ less:
The approach: try to fix technical, marketing, and customer service problems by applying the same rusty old car industry logic. Gradually water down the promise and file off the edges, so only the most fanatical still hold on to the hope of Saturn rising again.
Option B: Think like and human being = differ more:
The approach: Keep renewing the vision by continuing to make the cars even MORE different in ways that customers will appreciate, and keep innovating on the corporate, manufacturing, and customer service fronts (preferably by not having it be a GM company any more).
Their choice was clear: differ less
Over the 90’s, the cars looked and behaved less and less different from other cars on the road, and by 2000, the line had expanded to include the same-old range from sub-compact to SUV – diluting the core idea of what a “Saturn” was. The passion and excitement of Saturn customers waned – as did their repeat-purchase loyalty.
So by the late ’00’s, when the really big financial meltdown happened, Saturn was dragged down by the gravity of the GM’s collapse. At Beg to Differ, we can’t help but think that stronger differentiation, coupled with the fierce (and geeky) loyalty of those early believers would have carried them through.
The big questions for brand managers:
Which option are you choosing for your brand – differing more or differing less?
Are you thinking like a bean counter (internal logic) or a human being (brand logic).
Are your corporate pre-occupations hampering your ability to deliver on the human promise of your brands?
If you disappeared tomorrow, would any third grade teachers miss you?
More nostalgia from YouTube.
Japanese language ad: ordinary American country folk buildin’ cars:
Saturn homecoming – playing on the wholesome geekiness of Saturn owners:
This happens to me a few times every week: I’m standing at a store or restaurant, this web getting customer service by phone, information pills or buying something online, and suddenly I’m faced with a dazzling, badly organized array of choices like this menu board at an Ottawa area Dairy Queen Brazier (no comment on that name for today). And how does it feel? Well, imagine shoving a whole Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard down your throat all at once…
The THARN Effect: for me, this DQ board was a Brain-Buster Parfait
Basically, I had walked through the door having already made a number of choices: first I’d chosen between a dozen different food establishments in that neighbourhood; then I’d to choose to ignore my guilt about going with fast food at all; then I chose between ice cream – the product I normally associate with Dairy Queen – and hot food; and finally I had to choose whether to wait when I saw a significant lunch-rush line at the counter.
So by the time I got to the counter, after passing up several opportunities to walk away, you’d think DQ would try to make my life easier. But no, once I got inside the store, I faced a wall of giant posters with exclamation marks and starbursts all over them, and the menu board above that utterly failed to line up my choices in a clear way, filled with cleverly-named products that were all yelling, dancing, and fighting for my attention like a room-full of sugar-buzzed preschoolers whose Ritalin had run out.
Choice: the hidden “THARN”
Richard Adams, in his classic novel Watership Down, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice:
THARN: (adj) the helpless, catatonic state a rabbit enters when it is caught in the headlights of a car.
Humans react the same way when you throw too many choices at them: they go “tharn”. Sounds a lot like the headache most people get when they swallow too much ice cream doesn’t it? Like ice cream, small, measured bites are a heavenly experience; too much too fast is physically painful.
But bright headlights & ice cream sundaes are good aren’t they?
Now, you may say, “but that’s just effective consumer marketing”, and perhaps the marketing sages at DQ know something I don’t about what sells sandwiches. Plus, as a 40-year old male, I suspect I’m not at the heart of their target demographic.
I also don’t want to imply that choice is bad, nor is it a bad thing to get your customers to slow down a bit and pay more attention to you while you have their attention.
But remember all the other choices they had to make to get to your “counter”: it’s a delicate balance between deepening their understanding by showing them more and overwhelming them with too much choice.
So ask yourself:
1) Are you helping customers quickly scan their options by organizing clear “decision trees” of plainly labelled and named options?
2) Are you making them feel confident about your brand – that is, their their end-to-end experience of it , and not just the individual sandwich they buy?
3) Are your marketing tactics really deepening their understanding, or just adding to the wall of noise they already face and defeating the point of marketing (to help people decide to buy your products)?
4) Are you managing your whole brand including your product portfolio, your decision-making interfaces, and your customer service to remove THARN moments or are you just turning on the high beams and shoving the ice cream down their throats?
The choice is yours. Well, actually, it’s theirs. And that’s the real point isn’t it?
On Friday, October 9th at 8:00 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) Laliberté will be hosting a Webcast from space in support of his ONE DROP Foundation.![OD_Logo_Splash[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.begtodiffer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/OD_Logo_Splash1.jpg?resize=85%2C160&ssl=1 "OD_Logo_Splash[1]"){kind=logo}
, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice: