nader ashway

Facebook’s Mobile Phone: Three Reasons to “Unlike”

Nader Ashway3 Comments
facebook-phone
Concept art courtesy of Gizmodo

Facebook is set to announce this Thursday the release of the Facebook Phone in partnership with HTC. According to the latest mobile report from The New York Times, the plans are to manufacture the first smartphone designed around the total social/sharing experience that Facebook enables. Maybe it’ll be called PhoneBook? Ugh.

On paper, it’s a really good idea. More than a billion people use Facebook on a regular basis to connect with friends, weigh in on political ideas, and just generally brag. And as it turns out, MOST of them are posting, liking and commenting from a mobile device.

However, this announcement is NOT on paper. It’s real. And on most levels, it’s kind of silly. Facebook has become one of the most visible, one of the most recognized, and one of the most important brands on the planet, (although, according to the stock price relative to the IPO, NOT one of the most valuable.)

And yet, with all the Stanford MBAs on staff in their marketing and operations departments, is there anyone there voicing an opinion that this is a thinly veiled brand extension that’s simply designed to appease shareholders with a strategy to create more revenue streams? Because, let’s face it folks, that’s what it is.

The subtext of the “exciting” and “new” direction for Facebook is to have another screen for advertising. Period. Facebook’s entire valuation was built – however hastily, however erred – on the idea that a billion+ eyeballs is a road paved with advertising gold. Add another screen, and you can charge another scale. The new rate card must be getting a design makeover just like the news feed.

But that road to gold, being paved this week with this mobile announcement, is pocked with obstacles. From a marketing perspective, these three obstacles indicate a likely FAIL and another rough year for Zuck & Co.

Obstacle #1: A partnership with a questionable partner.
Facebook is partnering with HTC, a manufacturer that, as of the end of 2012, has less than 5% of the total global smart phone market share. What’s worse, the HTC moniker is inextricably linked with another epic fail of corporate overreach, RIM, and the BlackBerry platform.

Why not partner with the #1 or #2 player? With the heft of Facebook, why not approach Samsung or Apple and design a custom “version” of their popular phones designed more smartly around the Facebook experience? The full version of Android (the HTC model is using a modified version of the system,) or iOS would provide more seamless integration into the consumer’s current mobile experience. Facebook is still acting like a startup strapped for cash, when it should be carrying itself with the mien that they ALREADY have a seat at the big boy table.

Obstacle #2: Consumer adoption.
Brand extensions are a dangerous proposition, even in the best-case scenarios. And in this case, (which is not the best case,) it’s super-duper dangerous. As it stands, the consumer already has the option to have a BETTER piece of hardware than HTC, (with S3 and the soon-to-be-the-most-popular-phone-on-the-planet S4 or any of Apple’s iPhones,) a BETTER piece of software via the Facebook app on either the Droid or iOS platform, and the chances are the consumer ALREADY owns a device she’s happy with.

So it’s highly unlikely that someone is going to rush out and buy an inferior piece of hardware, running an inferior operating system to run an OS that’s focused on a social network so they can take pictures and post status updates from their home screens. The rest of the world already does that with relative ease and great enthusiasm.

Obstacle #3: Increased operational workflow and costs.
As if Facebook doesn’t have enough going on internally, (acquisition plans, acquired partners spinning off, implementation of contextual advertising, implementation of graph search, etc.,) now they’ll have to add a bunch of new pieces. This might include a coding team to fix v.1 bugs, a customer service department devoted to mobile, internal teams to interface with HTC, a dev team to work on v.2 and beyond, marketing and advertising expenditures around the device, operations around packaging and distribution and on and on. Yeccchhh.

I’m no Stanford MBA, but when you have increased operational expenditures, increased marketing expenditures and are projecting – at best – to penetrate a 5% piece of the pie, chances are you’re going to have to dip into your pocket to support this new initiative with a boatload of short-term cash.

Zuck, here’s my advice. KILL this deal before it erodes the stock price and further erodes consumer perception about Facebook quickly becoming the “uncool” social platform.

Want some free ideas?

– Blame HTC as an unreliable partner.
– Cite your unusually high expectations for the platform as a reason to delay the rollout.
– Say you’re working on even bigger and better features and you think you’ll roll out by Christmas.

In the last year or so in Menlo Park, you’ve already misstepped with the privacy policy bungle, the pace of HTML 5 integration, un-hipping Instagram and more. Right now, you need some WINS. And acquiring Hot Studio last week is not what I mean.

Wanna have lunch?

This article first appeared on Technorati.

Brands: Are they nature or nurture?

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I’ve been doing a lot of talking, teaching and pitching around the concept of brands, and it seems that a lot of people – including professionals in the brand business – still have wildly differing ideas about brands and what they are.  And while this post is NOT intended to clear everything up in 500 words or less, I do think that looking at it from a different perspective will help.  So let’s evaluate brands on the simple x/y coordinates of nature vs. nurture.

Let’s take a simple consumer category, like ketchup.  If we’re developing a NEW ketchup brand, we’d have to fit it in the market alongside the primary players like Heinz and Hunt’s and Del Monte, and let’s throw in the niche marketer Annie’s who owns the “all-natural” position.  Aside from the typical line extensions (organic, gluten-free, sugar free, etc.) not a very cluttered market at all.

ketchup_brands

The basic NATURE of brands in this category:

Ingredients
Texture
Flavor

If you were going to enter a competitor into the market, the brand would have to declare itself different by nature (a unique flavor, or a unique combination of ingredients, maybe they only source specific tomatoes, etc.) and then – and this is the important part – have to become different by nurture.

The way brands in this category are NURTURED:

Price
Packaging
Distribution
Merchandising
Advertising (national vs hyper-local)
Social Efforts
Publicity
Partnerships/Sponsorships

So we could develop a brand (let’s call it Kelly’s) and give it a certain NATURE so that it fits in the category and has a chance to carve out some market share.  Let’s suppose Kelly’s is sourced using only organic plum tomatoes from Italy, packaged in a really cool NON-plastic carton, and is frequently preferred over Heinz during blind taste tests.  (Lots of differentiation points there, and also lots of category parody.)

On its own, the brand’s nature should allow it to enter the market and do fairly well (given the right distribution.)

But here’s where you see that brands are NOT just the sum of what they’re made of.

For Kelly’s to survive – and ultimately, thrive – the real work would be in changing the hearts and minds of those who are in the market for ketchup to allow them to make “mental room” for a new player.  With Heinz owning about 55% of the market, Hunt’s about 20%, Kelly’s would be competing with Del Monte and “all others” for a piece of the remaining 25% of the roughly $1 Billion ketchup market.  At first.  But given the right climate, the right amount of time and the right combination of nature and nurture, there’s no arguing that Kelly’s could ultimately unseat Heinz for the #1 spot.

But how much would that cost, and how long would that take?

The answer lies in how the brand is NURTURED.  If the advertising is cool, and the brand selects some pretty cool partnerships and sponsorships, and doesn’t overly rely on price promotion, and does well on the b-to-b side with slotting and merchandising, and doesn’t suck, then it’s likely that nurturing won’t take too long.

However, if ANY of those things is slightly misaligned, and misperceptions ensue, then it will certainly elongate the process of adoption.

Brands are a phenomenon in two important ways.  First, they’re a perceptual phenomenon. Brands don’t actually exist.  As I’ve told my students, there’s no vault somewhere in Pittsburgh where the Heinz brand is “locked away.”  It simply exists in the minds of consumers as a sum of experiences and interactions.  And while all those versions from all those consumers are slightly different, they do share a basic collective complexion.

Second, brands are a cumulative phenomenon.  Meaning that those experiences, interactions and overall perceptions are forged over time – good or bad – and the one-word phrase that you may connect with the brand (“rich,”  “thick,” “sweet,” whatever,) gets more and more embedded over repeat impressions of that initial imprinting on your mind.

Until ultimately, brands are weighed in the moment of truth in the condiment aisle when the consumer ponders whether she wants “thick” or “sweet” or “rich” when it comes to what she’s putting on her next burger.

So – are brands nature or nurture?  Yes.
But the real work begins ONLY after you’ve gotten everything right.

Creative in Common

Nader Ashway3 Comments

When you consume as much advertising as I do, you start to notice patterns, like when two (or more) advertisements have a very similar theme.  Sometimes it’s an executional element, like the type treatment in a print ad.  Sometimes it’s the music bed in a radio spot.  Jeez, you work in this business long enough, and you start to recognize the more popular commercial actors in one television spot after another!

But once in a while, you catch a glimpse of creative synchronicity – two marketers plying their latest models using extremely similar conventions.  I’ve recently noticed this with the latest spots for Microsoft Surface and a revised spot for Kit-Kat bars.

Two gigantic corporations.  Two very different products.  Two disparate categories.  Two different audiences.  Two different agencies producing the work.  So how did they arrive at virtually the same executional strategy for their recent ads?

First, let’s take a look.

SURFACE

—

KIT-KAT

As you can see, these ads both employ a very specific creative strategy:  the “way in” to each spot is to focus on the “click-click” sound produced by using/consuming the product and create a commercial around it.

They’re both very entertaining.  The Surface ad starts with a little curious “click.” And then it’s followed by another, then another, and soon, the entire world is dancing in a Bieber-video-bonanza of clicking craziness.

In the KitKat spot, (which is not new, but has recently resurfaced in a media schedule that includes NFL programs,) the “click-click” of breaking off the chocolate wafers is soon followed by the “crunch-crunch” of eating the yummy snacks, harmonized with a few “mmm’s” for good measure.

Similar executions:  lots of different people, enjoying the product.  And interestingly, these multiple enjoyment scenes are focused around a singular commonality:  the click-click, or crunch-crunch.

Now there’s good reason to focus on this as a creative strategy.  For Surface, the click-click is an indication of the product features:  a self-stand for the tablet and the main focus of the spot, the quick-quick and easy-peezy snap-on of the Surface Touch Cover, a quick-click add-on that allows you to type into your tablet using a standard keyboard layout.  (You should also know that the Surface Touch Cover is sold separately, for about $120, and does not come with your Surface.)

For Kit-Kat, the click-click, crunch-crunch is the sound of the consumption experience of the product.  Break the wafer off with a click, enjoy the textured wafer with a crunch.  All for less than a buck.

Technically, both spots work very well.  They’re entertaining.  They’re light.  And they create a meme (click or crunch) around which to recall the product into top-of-mind awareness.  So far, so good.

But if we’re really evaluating these commercials on their merits, then by far, Kit-Kat wins without a contest.  Sure, the Microsoft spot is cool.  It’s sexy.  It’s energetic.  It’s youthful.  There are back stories on the filming and development of each scene (seriously, even extended scenes of just the schoolgirls dance routine,)  and “making of” videos with director Jon Chu.

But from a brand perspective, Kit-Kat gets more mileage out of this creative convention in a simple 15-second spot than Microsoft does in a one-minute choreographic extravaganza.  Why?  Because the “click-click” used in the Surface spot is highlighting a product feature (that a separately-sold keyboard can click on the tablet for a different type of use,) that has to be dramatically overplayed with all the dancing, twirling, and whirling about.  Conversely, the Kit-Kat “click-click/crunch-crunch” is a feature that is simple and direct, but most importantly, tied directly to the enjoyment benefit:  if you like a crunchy treat, you’re there in a matter of seconds – no big production number necessary.

Creative can be clever.  It can be cool.  It can be quirky.  It can even have things in common with other commercials.  As long as it makes you remember, (really important, especially for brand advertising,) it can pretty much be whatever it wants for whatever product or service or category. But in this case, you can see that it’s far better (and by better, I mean effective,) if the creative convention used in the advertising is tied directly to the enjoyment of the product – the benefit – derived from engaging with the features, rather than just on the features themselves.

Don’t you just love advertising?

Samsung Galaxy S3 ads: a “touch” of tech FAIL

Nader Ashway1 Comment

I’ve been seeing these Samsung Galaxy SIII commercials for months now.  You know, the one where two people “touch” phones and magically share stuff, like playlists or videos?  The first spot (not included here,) made its debut just prior to the release of the iPhone 5, and poked some good fun at Apple and their devotees waiting on long lines for the next great phone offering.  Samsung apparently has gotten good feedback from these spots, and they’ve rushed out several more.

Take a look:

And while I think they’re very good commercials (they each create a moment of drama centered around the product – that’s always good in advertising,) I’m just not sure it’s very good technology.

Let’s get this straight.  We’ve packed supercomputer technology (no really, the average smartphone today has more actual digital technology in its main chip than NASA – all of it combined – had at its disposal to launch the Apollo rocket into space,) into a tiny wireless device that fits in your pocket and runs practically all day on one battery charge.  With a smartphone, you can send a message – text, photo, video – INSTANTLY to your cousin in Kuala Lumpur (doesn’t everyone have a cousin there?) by pressing a few buttons.  [And actually – unless your name is Blackberry – there are no buttons!  It’s just glass with pictures of buttons! ]  With a smartphone, you can download music from the ether, and then listen to it in a matter of seconds.   With a smartphone, you can play an interactive video game, along with three friends in three different cities, in real-time.  And with these cooky add-ons called apps, you can harness vast amounts of neatly packaged information about whether or not your plane is on time, the history of nearly everything, how your stocks are doing and your absolute place in the world through a global positioning satellite.

So with ALL THAT technology literally and figuratively at your fingertips, are we supposed to be impressed that you can “touch” phones and share information?  Is that really a big deal?  Let me make it easy for you:  no, it’s not a big deal at all.

In fact, it’s counterintuitive.  For more on that, see my earlier post on Intuitive Marketing.  Because the very essence of having a wireless device is to figuratively “connect” you to people who are NOT close to you.  This idea of having to be in the same physical space as someone to enjoy the fullness of the phone is downright dopey.  It’s cheap.  It’s a throwaway feature that somehow got left in, and now Samsung is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to convince us how cool it is.   It’s not cool to touch phones.  Actually, I think it’s a little weird.  What’s next?  The Samsung Galaxy S4, now with WIRES to connect to every phone together?

Look in your own smartphone right now.  I’ll wait.  Of all your contacts, how many of them are within one square mile of where you are?  Not many, right?

So let me be very clear here as to why this advertising is twisting my knickers.  Samsung is essentially taking the LEAST useful, least helpful feature of their product and making it the MAIN focus of their advertising.  It’s like BMW running a complete campaign for their latest luxury model and focusing on the idea that you can roll down the windows with this neat little bar that you can insert into the door and turn it over and over again until the window is down.  Sure, the car’s got power windows that let you do that with the touch of a button, but LOOK!  You can roll it down by hand if you want! Ugh.

Lesson for all marketers, big and small:  be proud of your products, and celebrate them and their features through advertising.  But go to the HIGHEST value of your product (not the most gimmick-ey,) and start there.  Don’t beat us over the head with something that’s really not that important, or even really that cool, and then try to convince your audience that it is.  That’s not just bad advertising.  It’s bad business.

This article first appeared on Technorati.