Yeah, the one in China. Sometimes life is serendipitous: CCTV, the government owned television system, is doing a 5 part documentary on the financial crisis – why it occurred and what to do about it. They had heard about my new book, Crisis by Design, the Untold Story of The Global Financial Crisis www.behindthewizardscurtain.com and flew me over there to discuss global financial matters.

No joke. It was quite a trip. There is legitimate concern there about the financial coup d’ etat orchestrated off by the Bank for International Settlements last year. More on this later, but you can catch a glimpse of me here as CCTV promotes past and upcoming interviews (and if you think Fox News has a large viewership, these guys own the airwaves in the most populated nation on earth).

http://you.video.sina.com.cn/m/1112850533

But the point of this little missive is a marketing one, not financial.

I checked into the Beijing Hilton and this bright Chinese kid helped me with my luggage up to my room: nice space, great work area, big HD TV screen on the wall. And he says, in good English, “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles,” I say.

He goes from cheerful to ecstatic, “LA. Wow. I love Kobe. He’s my favorite.”

It is sincere enthusiasm, not a ploy for a bigger tip, because you don’t tip in this country – which is why this is a little odd to me. You see, Yao Ming, the 7’6” giant center with the Houston Rockets, who is from Shanghai, is a virtual God in China.

A couple of nights later, I am walking down Wangfujing and find what may be the reason for my bellboy’s enthusiasm. Wangfujing, by the way, is Rodeo Drive on mega-steroids.

Every major brand in the world seems to be represented on this street which is as wide as a freeway (no cars allowed in most parts) and runs into the distance as far as the eye can see.

And it is packed with Chinese shoppers – I mean packed. The above is not a picture from my trip, but Wangfujing was only slightly less crowded the night I was there. It was a Sunday night and it was freezing – literally the temperature was freezing or below – and you could hardly move on this street due to the crowds, which go on and on and on.

And then I saw it…up to my left was perhaps the largest billboard like display I had ever seen: Kobe Bryant charging down the court like a wolf chasing a fleeting prey, but he has the ball and the basket looms. Behind Kobe, up in the left hand corner of the piece, is what has become one of the most successful brands in the world – the Nike swish.

Cold as it was, I paused and admired the positioning. Nike has become the biggest name in sports equipment (worldwide sales = $18.6 billion) by positioning itself with many of the world’s greatest athletes.

This is positioning at its simplest and yet most powerful. Positioning is achieved by tying your product, your service, your brand to something that is already in the mind of your prospects. In sports, tying the brand to the top athletes in a sport is a no brainer.

But Nike has done it with power and panache like no one else in the history of sports advertising (there was a smaller billboard further down Wangfujing with a picture of Yao Ming. He was standing stoically holding a basketball wearing his Reeboks. Yawn.)

We didn’t create Nike’s position, but our clients do include some of the largest brands in the world: from Saatchi & Saatchi, to Hilton, Courtyard by Marriott and Hitachi Consulting. We have also serviced hundreds of smaller and medium sized companies. If your marketing isn’t biting the way you think it should, positioning might make all the difference.

At On Target Research, we have been creating unique positions for our clients for more than 20 years.

“The positioning that grew out of your research was nothing short of stellar. We now have a strategically researched, laser-like position that will dramatically assist us in rolling out our new brand.” Jeff Donner, President.

If you want to discuss positioning for your brand, or any survey needs, feel free to call me at 818-397-1401 or visit us on the web at www.ontargetresearch.com.

Have a spectacular 2010!

Bruce

I’m talking about the Doritos’ commercials on the Super Bowl last Sunday. Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division (owner of the Doritos brand) ran a series of Super Bowl ads that cost them some serious coin.

CBS charged $2.6 million for a 30 second Super Bowl spot this year (up just a bit from the $42,500 for Super Bowl I). If Frito-Lay paid the sticker price were talking $10.4 million for a couple of minutes of air time. But with 106.5 million viewers– the largest in television history – they had an historic opportunity to sell some chips.

So with about $10 million invested and 106 million prospects to talk to, they communicated a message of great clarity: Eating Doritos will bring you physical pain.

I kid you not.

One of the ads takes place in the exercise room of a gym. One guy – headband, sweat pants – offers his buddy – tank top, gym shorts – some Doritos, which he takes.

Then headband tells gym shorts that he got the Doritos “out of Tim’s locker.” This comment strikes such fear in the heart of gym shorts that he spits a mouthful of partially eaten Doritos onto the floor and says, “This is bad. Tim loves Doritos.”

Gym shorts no sooner utters these fateful words when he is struck in the side of the neck by a Dorito in the incarnation of a steel, ninja throwing dart, and falls over.

Cut to Tim: a psycho, covered in Doritos like the creature from the Black Lagoon with orange splotches, who attacks headband screaming.

Fade to black.

Makes you hungry, doesn’t it?

There was another commercial in the series that has the young son of an attractive black woman sharply slapping his mother’s suitor for checking out his mom as she walks into the kitchen and then taking a Dorito from a bowl on the coffee table. Junior is peeved and the sound effects of the slaps are loud and vicious.

Yet another shows a man sitting on a bench eating Doritos. A dog approaches and looks at the man longingly. The man won’t give the dog a chip unless he barks for it. The dog, unknown to the guy on the bench, is wearing a bark suppressing collar. The clever canine somehow gets behind the bench, removes the electronic device, and straps it around the man’s throat, who falls to the ground spasming from a series of agonizing electric shocks to his larynx.

See, here’s the deal: ads are supposed to sell something; they are supposed to create a want for the product in the mind of the viewer.

I know these commercials are supposed to be funny. And maybe some people were amused by Fido’s electric revenge or the attack of the Dorito-maniac. Maybe.

But the question is, did they increase the desire for a bag of Doritos? Sorry. No sale.

I later found out that these particular ads were the winners of a contest created by Frito-Lay for consumers to shoot home based commercials for Doritos to be played at Super Bowl commercial breaks.

Clever marketing idea on Frito-Lay’s part, and well done to the budding filmmakers for winning the contest. But the marketing executives that approved the multi-million dollar ad buy should be ordered to read Positioning The Battle for your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout on pain of having their corporate Blackberry accounts cancelled – because they sure as hell don’t have a clue what positioning is.

Newsflash: associating your product in the minds of your prospects with slaps, electric shocks, and steel darts might be better suited to promoting a psychiatric hospital than a snack food.

Google’s Super Bowl ad, on the other hand, was piece of marketing simplicity and effectiveness. It’s called Parisian Love.  It starts with a picture of the Google search box. You don’t see the person, but he types in “study abroad paris france.” And it rolls from there. The viewer watches a love affair develop between the searcher and a woman in Paris all played out in the sequence of terms rapidly typed into the Google search box.

When the commercial finishes, the viewer knows that he or she can find anything on Google from cafes near the Louvre to how to assemble a crib.

The ad works – just like Google.

Frito-Lay didn’t ask for this assessment of their Super Bowl commercials. Neither did Google. And while the pluses and minuses of these advertisements may seem all too obvious, some of the nuances of many marketing strategies are not so glaring.

This is why corporations large and small have us conduct reviews of their marketing materials. They get a professional viewpoint regarding the impact and communication potential of their websites, brochures, direct mail pieces and public relations messages.

The service is fast and inexpensive and provides them with an external perspective as to how they are communicating to their customers and prospects.

If you think this service might be of assistance to you in some way, please contact us at 818-397-1401. Or via our website at www.ontargetresearch.com

Best,

Bruce

President & CEO
On Target Research

I can’t tell you how surreal it felt standing under a large and oh-so-imposing image of Lenin while giving a talk to senior officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs just after the fall of Communism.

The Ministry, Russia’s Federal law enforcement body, is based on a military structure, so the room was full of uniforms hosting dazzling displays of medals and combat ribbons and hats adorned with more gold braid than a university marching band.

They were all Russian officers, most of whom, until a few months previously, had been Communists, or at least had paid it lip service. I later found out that I was the first American to ever address this group, which is probably why my initial reception was…oh, let’s call it “chilly.”

But they warmed up, actually. And by the time I was done with the talk, the room was abuzz with interest.

See, for 70 years, the primary communication line between the Russian police and the country’s citizens was a night stick. When Communism fell, the citizenry started to turn on the police.

It happened that I had gone to Moscow at this time to help open up a business college. The grand opening of the college included a conference and I’d given a talk on the use of surveys in marketing and public relations to a couple a hundred Russian entrepreneurs (a very new breed of Russian at the time). A lieutenant colonel from Ministry happened to in the audience.

After my talk, he approached me and asked if I might discuss the survey technology I had spoken about with his superiors at the Ministry.

I have always made it a habit not to turn down a request from a colonel of the Russian Internal Ministry when hanging out in Moscow. So the next morning my wife (who had accompanied me on the trip) and I found ourselves in a meeting with Colonel Stanislov Pylov, the Director of Personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. All police in Russia are federal, so this man oversaw the lives and fortunes of a million Russian Police.

We discussed many things that morning, one of which was the invitation to speak to the senior officers of the Ministry. Thus the talk beneath the visage of the Founder of the Russian Communist Party.

The other subject we discussed was the fact that the Ministry was having recruiting problems. Could the survey technology I had spoken of at the conference help the department improve its recruiting results, he wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. It could. Pylov stood up with such fanfare I thought Yeltsin had entered the office behind me. He walked over to a closet in his office and carefully removed a beautifully crafted wooden clock. He handed it to my wife as if it were a new born child and said, “This is a new day in the relations between the United States and Russia.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I briefly considered a career as a diplomat. But Reagan and Gorbachev had left things well under control, so I let the moment pass.
But a great deal came out of the relationship with Colonel Pylov, who became a good friend and ally, as well as an important partner in bringing important management skills to the Russian government.

But I digress.

I agreed to help Pylov with his recruiting problem. I won’t bore you with all the logistics of getting these surveys done, but trust me when I tell you it was a world-class challenge without a Russian speaking crew there; without any crew there.

But here is the punch line: you never know what your prospects need or want until you survey; until you ask them.

We needed to survey high school seniors, college students and returning military (the Ministry’s primary recruit pools). But we needed to train surveyors to do that, which was going to take some time. Pylov needed answers now and so I figured out a way to survey existing ministry staff to find out what had motivated them to choose a career in law enforcement in the first place.

This could give us enough initial information with which to start promoting, while we worked out the logistics of surveying others.

Why did people join the Ministry?

The answer will floor you. At least it did me. Even though I knew the only real answer would come from the surveys, in the back of my mind I thought it would be something like, “Catch bad guys,” or “Serve Mother Russia,” or even, “Protect our citizens.”

But remember this is just months after the fall of Communism. Almost no one owned anything. The state owned all. The general population certainly didn’t own cars, for instance.

The number one reason people joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs was because… they could ride the Metro for free – cops didn’t pay. That was it.

I don’t have the time to tell you the whole story, which rolled out through the early 1990s. But I usually end these short vignettes with a success story.

While this one is a bit unusual, and sounds rather self-aggrandizing, I tell it to make the point. And it was kind of fun.

One my second trip to Moscow, a few months after our initial work with him, Pylov picked me up in a Ministry car and drove me to the studio of one of Russia’s preeminent sculptors, Sergei Bychkov. I was ushered to a chair in a studio surrounded by huge statues of famous figures from Russian history. And Bychkov proceeded to sculpt a bust of me, which was cast in bronze and later placed in the Hall of Heroes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

This is not the kind of thing you wake up in the morning and think, “I ought to get my bust done in bronze and have it placed in the Internal Ministry’s Hall of Heroes today.” It’s just a little out there. But it shows you what a happy client can do (especially one that is highly placed in Russian law enforcement).

Busts aside, the moral of the story is a simple but important one: don’t guess at what your prospects think is valuable about what you sell; survey first. I promise it will pay big dividends.

I should know, our survey company has been getting these kinds of results for almost a quarter of a century.

If you need to know what is going to motivate your prospects to buy from you, call us at 818-397-1401 or visit us at www.ontargetresearch.com

Dasvidanya.

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO

Scott M. Ragatz, General Manager

Courtyard by Marriott, Norwalk, CT