Category: Marketing

As you may have heard - it’s been blogged a lot - KFC has created the “world’s first brand visible from space”; a 87 500 sq ft Colonel Sanders in the Area 51 desert. Which is great if you live on the ISS!

The stunt is part of the campaign to launch their updated logo: the Colonel had his double-breasted suit replaced and is now wearing an apron. Updated restaurant designs, advertising, point-of-sale and more to come, according to the KFC press release.

One can wonder if the giant logo is such a good idea.

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This blog is hosted by DreamHost, and I think it will continue to be so even though DreamHost has had some technical problems lately.

Why? Because DreamHost is a great company! And so says a lot of other people on the net.

Why? Because they encourage you to be a loyal customer and to talk well about them.

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Recently I was in the market for a new digital camera. I did quite a bit of research during this summer, scanning forums, review sites, questioning friends and family.

You see, buying a camera with interchangeable lenses is not just about the camera. It’s about picking a brand you can stick with. Once you’ve invested in a few good lenses, switching to another brand becomes expensive as your old lenses won’t work with that brand.

I finally settled for a Nikon D50 with a few additional lenses, fully aware of the fact that it’s a model Nikon is replacing with an updated one in the near future (the D80 was just announced and rumors of a D60 was circulating). The price had been cut, so I thought it was a great deal.

View from The Temple of Heaven, shot with my new Nikon D50.

Reading various photography forums, one person quickly emerged as an authority on Nikon gear: Ken Rockwell. Ken has a great site, giving advice on everything from lenses and other equipment, to softer issues such as how to convince your wife an expensive camera is a great investment. What makes his writing different - and I suspect is also the reason for his popularity - is that he’s very direct in his recommendations, and sometimes offers controversial advice on equipment issues (read Color Management is for Wimps for an example of this). You almost never leave his site feeling unsure about what he thinks is the right choice.

Ken Rockwell has been a Nikon loyalist since the 80s. But he’s starting to soften a bit. The reason? Nikon’s ridiculous slowness when it comes to making new gear available. He’s written a lengthy piece on it, comparing Nikon to Canon and listing announcement and delivery dates for a lot of recent Nikon gear. Not a pretty list. Not only that, he’s now started to review Canon gear.

Canon doesn’t seem to have been slow catching this. Ken now seems to be receiving their gear for review, having posted comparison reviews with Nikon cameras. He also writes Canon-only reviews, like this one.

How many times will this be quoted in other forums? How many times will someone write that even Ken Rockwell is giving up on Nikon?

I hope Nikon is paying attention to this. The word-of-mouth warning bells are very much ringing for Nikon.

• Gadgets’ new label: Made for China. No more dumping last year’s devices on the Chinese market.
• The Plot To Hijack Your Computer. About the $2 billion disrespect-for-users spyware business.
• How your product can inspire The Nod.

Click fraud cost internet advertisers $800 million last year, according to a study by Outsell Inc. Around 15% of all clicks on click-through ads were bogus (or rather, according to the article 14.6% of clicks were “believed by advertisers to be fraudulent”). As a consequence, advertisers are cutting back on spending, causing lost business of about $500 million for Google and Yahoo in the US.

Some bloggers now spell the end of pay-per-click advertising. I think that might be a false conclusion.

First, 15% bad clicks mean there are still 85% good ones. As long as you know that, it’s easy to calculate your real cost for click-through advertising. Just add to your cost per click to compensate for the bad ones. It might still be a good deal.

Second, what Yahoo, Google and others need to continue to do is to admit there is a problem and to develop effective means of detecting fraud. And compensate advertisers that have become victims of click fraud.

It’s reasonable to assume the 15% is caused by just a few publishers – not evenly spread over all publishers. Those few bad apples are probably quite easy to find. Not every system with security problems has to go down, as long as you manage the risk. Just ask the credit card companies.

Third and last; there might be other reasons to suspect programs like Google’s Adsense are dying. Publishers report decreased earnings from contextual pay-per-click programs, making them less attractive than other types of advertising.

One reason for this is that a lot of clicks coming from publishers are out of curiosity, whereas searchers click out of genuine interest. That would lead advertisers to opt out of having their ads on third party sites, as some have noted. In the end, publishers get paid less because there’s less competition for their clicks.

So, pay-per-click contextual advertising on publisher sites might be dying – slowly. But not primarily from click fraud.

This is what you get when you apply “paid media” thinking to building relationships with bloggers:

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll pay only for positive mentions.

…

It’s better for a brand to get into a blog than to surround it as a banner or text ad, says Murphy.

(From BusinessWeek: Polluting the Blogosphere)

This is stupid in a number of ways:

1. It will make your customers disappointed. They’ll expect a great product but will receive something mediocre that wasn’t able to get a positive buzz by itself.
2. You’ll target the wrong blogs. The high-credibility blogs about your kind of product wouldn’t touch this for fear of losing their readers. Your product will end up being mentioned on smaller blogs without a specific focus. It will be search engine fodder at best.
3. Bloggers will talk bad about your products “off the record”; telling their friend the only reason they wrote positively about your product was to earn $5.

Your positive word-of-mouth will end up being negative word-of-mouth in the places where it matters; where friends talk to friends.

Now, did I say this was stupid?

Microsoft is offering an Office 2007 Beta 2 test drive web site, where you can take the new Office, now in beta 2, for a spin inside your web browser. You need to install a plugin, but that doesn’t take long.

You may or may not like the product (my personal opinion: awfully cluttered!) but getting the opportunity to test them like this, without downloading the full thing, is great!

More software companies should do this.

I just returned from a trip to China. In Shanghai I took the opportunity to visit the Xiangyang market. I had been there once before, and to a couple of Beijing markets a few years ago. One thing really struck me at these last two visits; how much better the copies have become!

Now, there is still a lot of crap on offer. But there are also bags, belts and clothes that at least to my untrained eye look fairly high-quality.

There’s just this thing; they insist on slapping ridiculously unrealistic, and sometimes just plain wrong, logos on them. “Gucci” written in the wrong typeface, a Polo horse that looks nothing like the real thing, or “Boss” on the back of a tie, written on a kind of cheap plastic label I doubt they would ever use.

Why?

Fact is, a lot of these product would fare pretty well on their own merits. Just invent your own brand name. Sales, at least to foreigners, would increase.

You’ve read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and recognize that “Made in China” will soon become “Dreamed up in China”. Now read this lengthy article (The Gucci Killers, Fast Company) for an example of this happening. It’s about the creation of Shanghai Tang, Chinese “Gucci Killer”.

If you were to chose between connecting your product or brand to “China” or not, would you? Would attracting 400 million possible Chinese consumers push you towards a yes? Would the possibility of alienating a few hundred million Western consumers push you towards a no?

Consider these facts:

• According to this Synovate study, “only one in eight respondents from the US and key markets in Europe think highly of the quality of products made in China”. That’s why the “Made in China” sign is written in a 4 point font, hidden at the back of the washing instructions.
• According to the book The Rise of the Chinese Consumer: Theory and Evidence (by Jonathan Garner), national pride is a strong source of brand loyalty among Chinese consumers. You might want to appear more Chinese than you are to gain acceptance.
• In a globalized world, you are less likely to succeed in keeping separate images of your brand in different parts of the world. The Internet is pretty much everywhere and people will see you if you pretend to be something else somewhere else. You’ll have to pick a side.

Now which alternative is most tempting; having your brand be Chinese or not? Would you boost the fact that your product is made in China, or would you hide it?