It's the Cola

Pepsi is a very successful company in its own right, however their pursuit of Coca-Cola can be compared to one thing.

Wile E. Coyote keeps ordering new tools, trying new tactics, and continually fails to catch the Roadrunner. The only winner in Wile's incessant attempts is the Acme Company who continues to profit off of him.

Do you really want to catch the roadrunner, or should you set your sights on something different? Why spend all that money to make Mr. Acme rich?

Back in the better days, Pepsi was the choice of a new generation. Their advertising had a fun and youthful feel that still applied to everyone (remember, no matter how old we are, we want to be thought of as young). Though Coca-Cola has always been number 1, Pepsi wasn't too far behind. It was this threatening market position, and the results of the Pepsi Challenge that led Coca-Cola to make the colossal mistake of introducing New Coke.

Coke reversed their mistake, and for the most part kept their message strong. Meanwhile, Pepsi continued to chase them by using every celebrity and package redesign possible. In 2002, sales of Pepsi were 35% behind Coca-Cola in sales. The slogan was "Think young. Drink young." Then they abandoned the new generation. 2003 brought "The joy of Pepsi." 2004, "It's the cola." Now they are attempting to "Refresh Everything."

Notice anything about the new slogans? They're all head-on attacks against Coke. Joy, refreshment, and all about being "The Real Thing" are brand essences of Coca-Cola. The Acme Company was selling Pepsi countless logo revisions while their advertising messages were making people think about Coke. Today, they sit 41% behind the real thing.

When it comes to your business, do you want to be Wile E. Coyote, and constantly chase the Roadrunner? Or would you rather set a goal that won't have you always the one to have the anvil drop on you?

How to get people talking

So you want to be the popular company that people tell their friends about? Do something to make your product easier to use.

Andy Sernowitz pointed out an example of a product feature few probably think about. A big frustration for any parent is changing batteries for kids' toys. Often the toys require a special size screwdriver, and the hunt around the house for the proper tool while the kids are begging to play with the toy can be overwhelming.

Leapfrog replaced that screw with one that could be opened with a penny. They did something great with such an insignificant product component. What can you do?

You've built a monster, please don't feed it

This is my open letter to Ted Gilvar - CMO of Monster.

Dear Ted, you've made it about 18 months in a big role and continue to have an even bigger challenge ahead of you. Unemployment is high, which means a couple of things. You have a lot of potential users who need your service. But, there are fewer opportunities for those people to find on your site. So what do you do when there are too many customers looking for too few products? You need to make it the best damn experience those people have ever had.

You've already built a monster, please don't feed it anymore.

As someone who has frequently utilized Monster and many other job search boards, we hate them. For the most part, job boards are just a necessary evil that we endure. Painfully gnashing our teeth and cringing as we type every letter of the URL. To be fair, Monster is infinitely better than CareerBuilder, and I do prefer it over HotJobs. But no one is getting excited to use your site.

We don't need any more advertising. We don't need clever promotions. We don't need banner ads, search ads, a social media presence, or interface updates. We don't need a logo redesign, website refresh, or anything like that. We need a brand we can trust.

Why does a marketing executive of over 10 years get search results for a "home health nurse," "finance & accounting manager," or "administrative assistant," all of which could be disastrous. But even worse, there are somewhere around 2,000 ways to say "door-to-door commission salesperson who will never earn $1" and you have them all wonderfully camouflaged as legitimate job listings that we have to sift through to find something that may even be remotely relevant to us.

I understand that you don't create the jobs, and there is a natural urge to not turn down money from advertisers. But a bit of quality control and categorization to help users find relevant jobs would make you the uncontested number one job site and make your brand the one and only household name anyone would ever think about using when they need a job. It is time to improve your product. It's called brand management. Make a product that people won't stop talking about. If every user was able to upload their resume, fill in a profile, and see nothing but relevant opportunities, hiring managers and candidates alike would love you forever.

You've got $250 million to spend. Certainly it would take a lot less than that to make it happen, and you'd never need to advertise again. It is time to improve the product in a big way. It's not as if we don't know what Monster is, we just don't want to use it.

Now with more juicy bits of orange

Several years ago I ran across a selection of orange juices. There was a pulp-free variety, one with added calcium, and a variety with "some pulp." All were priced the same, except for one that had the following label:

"Now with more juicy bits of orange!"

That variety was 75 cents more per gallon. Someone successfully was charging more for doing less because they took a negative sounding word and made it delicious. The word pulp is not pleasant sounding. But juicy bits of orange are downright tasty. Certainly most people would understand that juicy bits of orange are what they know as pulp, and those who are anti-pulp would avoid this variety, but there are people who like this product and they want something that sounds good.

Take a look at your products. What attributes are there that people enjoy, but you are selling short or failing to highlight at all? Shouldn't you get noticed for those benefits before your competitor comes along and sells the same attribute but gets more attention?

The bigger the company, the bigger the blunder

Toyota stumbled into a mess with a launch of their new 4-Runner website. (I imagine this site link will soon be broken, since they're going to need to rectify the situation). To set the mood of wildlife for their SUV brand, they looked to photographers on Flickr to provide photography for the microsite. They found several great photographs which were used, unfortunately they never asked the photographers for permission.

Michael Calanan (a talented photographer & friend) posted his concern on Twitter the evening of Tuesday, November 3. The conversation towards @Toyota must have got their attention, as they promptly tweeted Wednesday morning to the photographers involved.

This is why your company needs an experienced marketer on staff. Real marketing directors have an understanding of intellectual property laws. Photographs, fonts, illustrations, and other design elements found online are not free for you to use, especially for commercial purposes. Further, marketing personnel are meant to understand consumers. First and foremost, the responsibility of marketing is to know what motivates people, and how they will react. Not knowing that professional photographers would certainly notice the increased traffic on their Flickr pages, and be upset about someone using their work without contacting them is a fatal mistake. If they fail to understand this, do they understand what Toyota customers actually want from their vehicle? There may not be a correlation, but it begs to be asked.

If I was to guess, I would say it was not malicious intent of Toyota to steal these photographer's work, but was a lack of intellectual property understanding. That does not excuse what they have done. Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. Whether you are a multi-billion dollar company, or a small boutique, you need to respect the property rights of others. If you are unsure of what you can or cannot do, ask for help from a real expert.

Listen to your customers - but not that way

You need to be listening to your customers. Success is that simple, as long as you remember what to do once you have heard them. A business also needs to acknowledge what their purpose is, to provide for, solve, or otherwise make our consumer's life better. Why else would they part with their money if your business did not provide something of value to them? We need to listen to our customers, but if we are not the experts who solve the problem, rather simply facilitating the literal translation of what they asked for, why would they need us?

Henry Ford once said, "if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Asking a customer exactly what product they want will not yield the innovation that will make you the market leader. You need to listen to your customer's goals, desires, and aspirations to develop a product that they did not know they needed.

Focus groups and other consumer feedback help us understand what is important to people. However, as Ford learned with Edsel, consumers all loved the features of the car but that did not turn into an overwhelming success. In fact, despite the consumer feedback, Edsel is often referred to as a colossal failure. Where Ford went wrong was determining what was most important to the consumers, which was a more affordable car.

Coca-Cola made a similar mistake with a cola formula that was preferred in most taste tests. Despite the positive reaction they received in blind-tasting results, New Coke became a disaster for the company.

Conversely, Dietrich Mateschitz hired a market research firm to test his new soft-drink and received bad news. "People didn't believe the taste, the logo, the brand name." But he launched his drink anyway and Red Bull has been a tremendous success.

The lesson is, if you present product options to consumers, they will pick what they are familiar with. This is not because they are uncreative or resistant to change, but that they have to base their opinions on what they know. It's your job to introduce them to the next thing they will want.

Does the type matter?

Typophiles have been up in arms over a furniture retailer and its choice of typeface. If you're missing the controversy, type "verdana" into Google to see how much talk is circulating about Ikea's choice of fonts for their new catalog and in-store signs.

If you're not familiar with the typeface, Verdana is a font developed for easy on-screen reading at very small size. It's not an attractive typeface, and immediately drew massive criticism by designers, marketers, and type developers.

Ikea, please get rid of Verdana.

But according to Ikea spokesperson Camilla Meiby, "We're surprised. But I think it's mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don't think the broad public is that interested."

True, designers, typophiles, and marketing experts will know why they do not like this move, but just because the general public does not know what the typeface is does not mean their opinion does not matter. By the end of the week I began seeing comments on Twitter from people who visited Ikea and mentioned the signs in the store were unpleasant.

According to the AP, Ikea said that in order to reach many people in many different ways, it needed a font that works in both digital and print media. Read between the lines and we see the novice brand management mistake that nearly every marketing firm makes. The belief that design consistency is brand management. While it is important to have consistent elements to your brand design, it is your product (which includes customer experience) that matters most. Put another way, Ikea was more concerned with a consistent use of a typeface rather than asking their customers what they like.

Does typeface matter? Yes. Your printed materials need to be pleasant to the consumer. First & foremost, your customers need to be happy. There are elements of your design that should be consistent so that customers make the connection and feel the trust you have established with your brand. But getting wrapped up about the ease of website text and trying to make it consistent across all mediums is ignoring aesthetics.

Just because your customers are not graphic designers, does not mean their tastes don't matter. Never underestimate your customers.