branding

Pop-up Marketing: The Good, the Bad and the Opportunity.

Nader Ashway1 Comment

You’ve heard the term, you’ve read the intelligence papers, you may have even found yourself in a pop-up retail shop over the holidays.  But is the pop-up model worth the investment?  Is it worth it to your brand?  And if you’re a small to midsize brand, is the model feasible for you?

The Good

Pop-up marketing, whether it’s a retail store or some kind of neat, immersive consumer experience, can create immediate revenue from a new source with a moderately approachable expense ratio.  If it’s a retail shop, you’re typically not locked into a long-term lease, can poach staff from other locations and stock the shop with inventory and display equipment that you already own.

The pop-up model allows your brand to extend in a different direction, which can be very healthy, and even serve as a self-solvent research program.  Perhaps you install an outpost of a well-liked operation in a new location to test adoption; or try a adding a different type of inventory to your typical operation in a new part of town; or maybe you bring a certain type of merchandise into a retail cluster that doesn’t feature your wares; all of these options are feasible and can expand the appeal of your brand.

As a result, pop-up marketing can also generate a healthy amount of buzz.  The brand now has a new reason to interface with existing customers, can reach out to new prospects with a new offer, and can also establish new b-to-b relationships with suppliers, buyers, shippers, designers, etc.

The Bad

Despite all the benefits of pop-up marketing, there may be instances where the temporary nature of the model can actually damage the brand.  For instance, a customer walks down Spring Street in SoHo and sees that a pop-up shop for a hot designer has, well, popped up.  Not able to stop in at the moment, he makes a mental note to return in a week or so.  Upon return, an empty space, with a sign on the window:  “For lease or sale.”

So why is this so bad?  Proponents of pop-up marketing will argue that the customer will go and seek out that hot designer elsewhere, since the pop-up stimulated awareness and maybe even a modicum of desire for the brand.  However, there’s a snub factor there that can impact perceptions of that designer.  It may even be that prospect X now harbors some latent hostility for that brand since it’s no longer easily available.  Or worse, a whole group of customers who may not “get” pop-up marketing might think that hot designer wasn’t so hot after all, and had to close down…not knowing that it was a pop-up shop in the first place.  Perceptions matter in marketing.

On a larger scale, we live in the Internet era, an age where data are stored for eternity and accessible anytime at our fingertips.  The very nature of the information superhighway is embedded with the notion of permanence.  It’s the Library of Congress + every local town library + every special interest database times a zillion.  And it’s always on.  For better or worse, this is the training the average consumer has been given for the last decade and a half.  The pop-up model is antithetical to that rearing.

For instance, what would happen if Facebook just disappeared?  In yesterday’s New York Times, I read an article about how Friendster is about to dump thousands of terrabytes of data – personal memories, photos, posts and testimonials from about seven or eight years ago.  People are up in arms.  Some are distressed.  Many are vocal about their disapproval.  Friendster’s data dump is the pop-up model gone awry.

The Opportunity

So if you’re a small or midsize company, and you’d like to give your brand a boost, you might consider pop-up marketing as a viable short-term solution.  Remember that retail is only one form of pop-up marketing.  Obviously, if you’re a service provider, it’s hard to sell customized solutions in that model.  So be creative:  consider events as a pop-up marketing opportunity: short-term, low overhead, and an opportunity to drive leads and create new business-side relationships.

For the best brand impact, though, consider something truly creative.  Where would your brand do well, but in a physical or perceptual space that your customers might not expect?  The most powerful combination in marketing is relevance + unexpectedness.  If you can create that for your brand using a pop-up model, you might see another good combination emerge:  short-term expense + long-term brand value.

I’ll take the airlines. But please hold the advertising.

Nader Ashway3 Comments

Face it, big airlines.  You suck.  You suck because you can’t keep your promises. You suck because you’re delivering the same or less service than you were a year ago, and charging way more for it. You suck because you can’t even throw in the lousy meals anymore. You suck because your advertising is a big fat lie.

Please American, Continental/United, Delta, and yes, even you JetBlue.  Please do us all a favor.  Stop spending tens of, no make that hundreds of millions of dollars on all that advertising only to fail us at the ticket counter, and at the gate, and in the sky and when we get our credit card statements.

Truth is, you don’t have exceptional service.  You don’t have the lowest fares.  You don’t have the best routes.  You don’t have the most flights.  You’re not really that convenient after all.

Come to think of it, it’s really funny how just about ALL your advertising focuses on those key benefits, when almost none of you can deliver on these basic promises.

Instead, let’s focus on the basic truths:  across the board, your service is on the scale somewhere between below-grade and adequate.  I don’t discount that there may be an exceptional and caring employee flying the skies on any given A320, but by and large, your staff is just going through the motions.

Your fares are out of whack, and on no discernible pattern. I recently researched a flight from New York/Newark to San Diego on Continental.  (I looked up to THREE months out.)  $1,064.  REALLY?  A thousand bucks?  I could practically get chauffered out there on that dime.  And, hey, JetBlue, those “discount” fares of yours are all but a distant memory now, huh?  When I compared, you were only about $200 cheaper.  Honestly?

And can I ever get on a flight that isn’t “oversold?”

What’s astonishing to me is that the basic laws of marketing, branding and social media all state that airlines should essentially wither on the vine and die, and lose share to the competitor that meets customer needs, and to a market that demands choice.  And yet, these behemoths survive.  Promises are being broken, word of mouth is almost entirely negative, (when was the last time you heard about an “exceptional” flying experience from a co-worker?) prices are going up, and now you’re getting charged for checked baggage and crazy needs like “legroom,” and big airlines seem to almost universally be having banner years.  Where is the competitor who “gets it?” Where is the market demanding choice?

So again, I state my initial request.  Please re-allocate your budgets.  Hold the advertising.  Take the 8- and 9-figure advertising budgets, and instead, just lower rates.  Just STOP with the checked bag fees.  And please stop making me sit in the middle of row 26 when I book a flight a month in advance.

The IKEA brand – is it TOO Swedish?

Nader Ashway1 Comment

Ikea is an impressive brand.  It’s the world’s largest furniture retailer, it’s privately held, there are more than 300 stores in 37 countries, and nearly half a billion unique visitors hit the website in the last year.

Perhaps more impressive is the way the company is marketed and how the brand is communicated.  Ikea has embraced the direct marketing model (the Ikea catalog is published in 27 languages and accounts for something like 70% of the company’s total marketing budget,) and great pains are taken to sell the Swedish-ness of the company.

The stores themselves are bold blue buildings with yellow lettering and highlight features.  These are the national colors of Sweden.  The furniture names are based on a disciplined system, and feature words and names of decidedly Nordic/Scandinavian provenance.  Names like Besta, Ektorp, Framsta, Inreda, Karlstad, Pragel and Varde.  The stores even feature restaurants and food markets serving Swedish meatballs, cinnamon rolls (whose aromas usually flood the checkout areas,) and lingonberry jam.

But being soooo Swedish can have its drawbacks, too.  For instance, most Ikea stores feature a “one-way” meandering layout, forcing the consumer to go through virtually every section of the store just to find his or her desired items.  There are shortcuts, but people rarely use them.  Most American retail consumers prefer aisles and rows to quickly find what they came for.  Further, the furniture itself is almost always a self-assembly.  This is to keep costs down and to improve the complex inventory stocking process – most Ikea stores are simply warehouses with a nice second floor.  Again, quite different – most American furniture stores deliver your furniture and assemble it for you.

The real doozy in Ikea stores comes when you try to check out. Most shopping carts feature two fixed rear wheels and two swiveling forward wheels, which allow you to “steer” in any direction you choose. The shopping carts at Ikea feature four swiveling wheels, which means that as you navigate the wiggly winding path the store forces you to take through the maze of Nordic-named furniture, the cart is zigging and zagging into merchandise displays and even fellow shoppers. Then, as you self-load your 150-lb bookshelf, the cart becomes nearly impossible to maneuver, simply growing a mind and a navigation system of its own.

I submit that Ikea is one of the most consistently delivered and managed brands.  But in a few cases, in a few countries, they could make intelligent and insightful compromises to improve the consumer experience.  Starting with less-Swedish shopping carts.

Empty promises give me the JetBlues

Nader Ashway2 Comments

I’m a JetBlue fan.  I like the brand, I like the approach, I like the planes.  Nearly everything about the way they do business has been pretty positive for me, and I fly them when I can, despite having my frequent traveler account with another airline.

This morning, JetBlue sends me an email blast promising fares as low as $49.  So I bite.  I consider taking a quick trip to Buffalo to visit an old friend who just had twins – and heck, maybe I’ll catch a Bills game while I’m there – a great way to spend a Sunday in the early fall.  It sure beats driving for all those hours.  And for $49 each way, it’s a steal!

So I click through on the email. I know I’ve landed on the vanity/landing page because the form fields are pre-populated with my departing and arriving cities, corresponding to the NYC-BUF link I clicked in the email.  (Nice work.)

However, there are NO flights for $49.  In fact, the LOWEST fare I find is $94.  That’s almost double the promised fare.  So, being a good consumer, I blame myself and think about changing my travel dates.  (Notice the ethos there?  As consumers, we always defer to the position of being wrong…it could NEVER be the brand.)

I change the dates to six weeks out.  And still, no fare under $79. It took about three revisions in the six to eight week travel window to find a one-way fare at $49.  Naturally, it included a Saturday night stay (a relic platform of the old travel industry to punish business travelers and/or encourage leisure travel,) and/or traveling at some insane hour (care to leave NYC at 10:40 pm to arrive in Buffalo after midnight?) to get that fare.  There were also very few $49 fares returning to NYC.

Marketers, listen up. When you send an email blast and brag about your new offer, like fares as low as $49, your consumers better find those fares pretty readily when they click through.  When you can’t deliver on basic promises that you prepare for promotions like an email blast, how can you expect your consumers to believe that you’ll deliver on the larger brand promises or the value proposition?

When you SAY you have this great offer, but can’t deliver on it, that’s not making a real promise to your consumers, that’s baiting someone into clicking.  Exactly what people HATE about marketing, and distrust about email marketing in particular. Each time you blow it and can’t deliver, you’re eroding trust in the brand – and that’s way harder to make up than the short term gains you hoped to realize with the promotion in the first place.

So be very careful what you promise.  Especially if you can actually deliver it. Marketing is the one arena (well, maybe politics, too) where you have to DELIVER on your promises, then POINT OUT how you delivered on your promises. The best thing that could have happened in this JetBlue scenario is that I would have clicked through, found a couple of $49 fares, and seen a star or a burst or some sort of acknowledgment that affirmed the email blast – “Here they are, those $49 fares, just as we promised!  Why not take one?”

That’s cheesy, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the letdown of finding nothing even close to the promised offer.