gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

marketing evolves when language evolves

I loved the comment my friend, James Cherkoff left in my last Dell-related post.

Almost all commercial copy increasingly sounds like something from the 1950's when compared to the bazaar of the live web. The example I use is one very close to my heart - Arseblog, the super-popular blog about Arsenal FC [London's largest pro soccer team].

While Arseblog offers insightful, balanced football analysis his colourful language is very much of the terraces - not the boardroom. For instance, here's a description of the morning-after his return to Dublin, following a long stay in Barcelona :

"My brain is discombobulated and I have had to send Blogette off to her new school wearing my runners which are at least 4 sizes too big for her because all of our stuff is in a box coming from Spain. I now have no shoes at all but I am wearing her fleecey red dressing gown. So all of you who might have a hangover today at least be thankful you have some shoes. I have no shoes. I am like a bag lady in a red dressing gown without any bags."

You would be forgiven for thinking that such rhetoric wouldn't ingratiate him with the club, a famously conservative organisation. In fact, the opposite is true and the Arsenal Chairman, an old-Etonian, and Amy Lawrence, a journalist at The Observer, are both regulars on the blog's Arsecast podcast.

[N.B. "Arse" is English slang for "Ass", "Butt", "Rear End", "Bum" etc. Fun bit of wordplay etc.]

I've been saying this for a while: Art is Language. Marketing is Language. Art evolves Language, Language evolves Art. Same with Marketing. Your marketing will evolve once your language evolves.

My three big marketing successes, English Cut, Stormhoek and The Microsoft Blue Monster didn't work because I had some clever, rocket-science metric for them to play with. They succeeded simply because I convinced all three parties to talk to their markets in ways they simply hadn't been talked to before.

English Cut is probably my most lucid example. My friend, Thomas Mahon is one of the top bespoke tailors in the world, certainly one of the top on London's Savile Row. His handmade suits fetch upwards of $5,000 if, and only if you can get on his waiting list for an appointment.

Instead of the usual high-end, mahogany-paneled, men's fashion blether ["Imagine yourself draped in the luxury only a privileged few can aspire to yak yak yak... The highest standards of quality and service maintained since 1852 yak yak yak..."], what did he do? He started praising his competition. And he used informative, helpful, friendly, straight-talking language in the process:

Kilgour's (formerly Kilgour French & Stanbury). I have a very soft spot for this firm, as their old cutter, George Roden offered me a job when I was very young and just starting out in the trade. An excellent pedigree in classic tailoring (Carey Grant was a favourite customer), but even though they keep one foot firmly in the past, they're not frightened to move forward. This is shown in the new contemporary facelift their shopfront just had. They also have an excellent ready-to-wear collection.

And it worked. Sales went from a steady trickle to through-the-roof in less than a year.

Whether we're talking about a large company like Dell, or a small cottage industry like English Cut, the first marketing question to ask is not what tools and strategies we want to use- the first question to ask is, "How do we wish to talk to people differently, than how we were talking to them before?"

Once you can answer that, the tools and strategies will quickly and easily reveal themselves.

Language. It's all about Language. You want me help you with your marketing, you have to be willing to talk to me about Language. Exactly.

cluetrain was right.

["Edges 7". Part of The Edges Series. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

My buddy over at Dell, Richard Binhammer left me some food for thought in the comments section of my latest Dell-related blog post. Worth checking out.

Richard points out that yes, although Dell is best known for its "Efficiencies" i.e lowering the cost of making and selling computers to people, he personally thinks there's another primary drive of Dell which he feels often gets overlooked: "Getting closer to the customer".

That direct connection with customers contributed to the impetus for much our involvement with blogs, Ideastorm, Twitter...and so much more.

Well, as we all know, human beings don't scale. Micahel Dell can't have a friendly game of golf with EVERY PERSON who wants to buy a $450 laptop. Maybe if your company is buying 25,000 servers off him globally next year, he'll free some time up in his diary, but...

Doc Searls brilliantly quipped in the Cluetrain, "Markets are Conversations". But markets are also about getting stuff done. Often by lots of people at the same time. In the real world. Harder than it looks.

I take Doc's use of "Conversation" primarily as a metaphor. Take it too literally and the metaphor starts losing its power. Religious metaphors often run up against the same problem: Virgins have babies, really? Gosh, I did not know that! Wow, dead people rising from the grave after three days? Cool, where can I get some?

That being said, for large companies like Dell there is a sweet spot in here somewhere- a place that allows your company to "converse" like a human being, that lets you [within reason] get closer to the customer, while still allowing you to scale. It's devilishly hard to get there, though. If it were easy, case studies wouldn't be so thin on the ground as they currently are.

The good news is [and from my first-hand observation, Dell have also found this to be the case], that "Marketingspeak" doesn't work very well on the internet. That acting like a drone doesn't work very well, either. That human beings respond far better to other human beings on the internet, than they do to faceless, corporate spokesmen. And as more and more of large businesses' communication moves to direct, two-way online conversations with their their end-users, companies will have no choice BUT to act increasingly human.

And this increasingly human voice won't just affect the marketing, it'll affect the entire organization. For the better, I believe.

Sure, corporate conversation may never scale to the level of intimacy some of my crazier blogger friends hope to live to see. That being said, today there's still a tremendously large opportunity for the people who can lead the way, who can, like the cartoon above implies, keep pushing the edges. That's why Dell interests me. Same with Microsoft. As far as big companies are concerned, in this department, they're leading the pack.

[Afterthought:] None of this is anything new to those who read the Cluetrain in the early days, of course. What pleases me is, how Cluetrain is gradually being proved right over time. And I remember vividly how, in our hearts, we all wanted it so BADLY to be right, even if proof was somewhat lacking, all those years ago.

[Bonus Link: My old advertising buddy, David Carlson, who now lives out in Vietnam, writes an interesting and upbeat blog post about attending Barcamp Saigon.]

so what’s a crazy-ass cartoonist in alpine, texas going to do about dell, anyway?

["Edges 6". Part of The Edges Series. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

I've spent a lot of time in the last few days thinking about Dell Computers, a tech hardware company from Round Rock, Texas. Here are some notes:

1. When I developed The Blue Monster idea for Microsoft, a wee voice told me there was a business model in there somewhere. Some kind of post-advertising, Purpose-Idea, social-object, marketing-disruption kind of thing. Something that would scale, something one could turn into a little cottage industry, creating TONS of value for the fraction of the cost of the traditional advertising agency model. Dell liked the idea, and let me have a meeting with them. Since then I've been having this little back-and-forth with them, trying to get know the company better, trying to figure out an "Angle of Alignment" with them that would hopefully allow me to create something interesting.

2. So far it's been a great experience. Working mostly with Richard and Lionel, they've been introducing me to tons of people, while I've been trying to get my head around the company- what they do and why they do it.

3.Though I find it a bit simplistic [nor do I agree with much of it], I love this article from Fake Steve Jobs, "Why Dell Won't Bounce Back"

Bottom line is this: the only innovations worth making are the ones involving product ideas and product design. I mean, Duh. Right? It's pretty obvious. What's amazing to me is how few companies actually seem to realize it. To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.

The article basically lines up all the most obvious challenges Dell faces. Like I said a while ago, I see Dell's challenges fall into four main categories:

i. Evolution of customer service. Sure, they have a ways to go. Then again, don't we all etc. They've certainly come a long way since Jeff Jarvis and the whole "Dell Hell" episode, which gives me reasons to be cheerful.

ii. Design. Ten years ago, I didn't own a computer. I really didn't. The company I worked for gave me one- a Mac desktop. The internet was still relatively still in its infancy back then, so besides using Word to do my job, sending emails, and surfing the net occasionally, I didn't really have a lot of use for it. Now I can't imagine life without my laptop.

To use a Real Estate allegory: When your company sets you up with a temporary accommodation in a new town, you don't really mind too much that it's Embassy Suites. It serves a function. But let's say you're looking for a new house for you and your spouse and young children to move into, your needs become A LOT more exacting. Not to mention, a lot more expensive in terms of both square footage and decor. There's a reason why commercial real estate tends to be cheaper than residential etc.

More and more people are using their own computers to do their work. Their "Own Homes" for their data, as it were. Dell has long been been in the "Temporary Accommodation" business, for other people's data. And now as the market changes, they're having to make the move from building "Embassy Suites", to building actual "Private Dwellings". There's a contextual headshift to work through. And it won't happen overnight- it's a big company.

iii. India & China. In 2007 for the first time, Dell made more money from outside the USA than from inside it. 50.2% vs 49.8%, I believe are the figures. The question is not about how one get more business from the West Coast, Mac-using hipster crowd. The big question is, how do you get technology into the hands of people who THIS SIMPLY WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AN OPTION FOR, even a couple of years ago?

iv. Culture. To me this is the biggest issue of the four. You can't thrill your customers until you thrill yourself first. Let's face it, a big part of the Dell schtick is built around processes- sales, manufacturing, controlling costs and all that lovely, corporate back-office stuff. That's fair enough, most big companies operate like this. I would very much like to know, what percentage of Dell employees feel "This is just a paycheck", versus how many feel, "Dammit, we're frickin' changing the world here"...?

4. Somebody at Dell once described his employer as "Ordinary people doing extraordinary things." Though my granny always told me that it's good to remain humble, and to a large extent, I do agree with that sentiment, I did scratch my head a wee bit at that one. Does Microsoft see themselves as "ordinary"? Does Apple? I doubt that they do.

5. Though it's still early days, I think Michael Dell coming back from retirement to captain the company [like Steve Jobs did at Apple] is a big deal. I think the effects are only just beginning to show themselves. Personally, I'm glad to have him there.

6. Part of my motivation for working with Dell is simple patriotism. For 20 million Texans to prosper long-term, we need large, world-class creative powerhouses. Same as every other state in the Union, same with every other nation on Earth. We've done the efficiency thing for three hundred years, and have gotten quite good at it. Like I said in my talk at StartupEmpire the other day, the future of wealth is now all about "Creativity". Embrace it, or die.

7. They're called PCs, they're not called BCs. They're called personal computers, not business computers. That being said, the demands of an affluent, creative American are different from the needs of an IT manager in a large widget factory. As the lines that separate business and personal get ever more blurry, I see all major computer companies [including Gosh! Yes! Apple!] struggle to bridge the gap.

8. I asked somebody at Dell what she thought made the company so special, what separated it from the others. "Basically, we're tenacious sons-of-bitches," she said. Good answer! As I spoke to more and more Dell folk during my many visits to their Round Rock campus in the last 6 months, this "tenacity" started to become easier and easier to sense. I find that encouraging.

9. The Edges cartoon series came directly out of my talking with Dell. They spent the last 20 years "pushing the edges" of manufacturing, supply, distribution and pricing [and the world, frankly, would be a lot poorer had they not done so]. Where else can they push outwards? Design? Customer Service? I have no idea. Only they can answer that. [Note to Dell Employees: If you can shed any light on this question, I want to talk to you. Please feel free to ping me at gapingvoid@gmail.com, Thanks.]

10. "Live on the edges or not at all" are pretty empty words, unless you can actually live by them. Harder than it looks. Maybe "Live on The Edges" is the right choice of words to articulate Dell's Purpose-Idea, maybe it isn't. At the very least, it'll start a conversation internally, maybe externally as well. I don't really care at the moment. All I'm trying to do is get my head one step closer to understanding the collective drive of the company. And I don't mind failing a few times in order to get there.

11. Trying to create a "Blue Monster" for any company, be it Microsoft, Dell, or whoever, is basically an act of futility. That's what makes it interesting. That's what makes it potentially powerful. That's what makes me love doing it.

[Backstory: "Blue Monster: Why Social Objects Are The Future Of Marketing"]

[Written at Harry's Tinaja, Alpine, Texas.]

"stormhoek. made In south africa. drunk in west texas."

Stormhoek finally got a distribution deal here in Texas, and so now I'm back on the case.

Two problems: 1. No marketing budget to speak of, and 2. I live in Alpine, Texas, 400 miles west of Austin in the high desert mountains.

Looks like I'm going to have to improvise...

No matter. Like I told the folks at Stormhoek, if I can sell South African wine to West Texas cowboys, I can sell it to anybody.

So last week I got me a 4-by-8-foot piece of masonite, and painted a billboard, which I'll soon be putting up by the roadside.

"Stormhoek. Made In South Africa. Drunk in West Texas."

Expect photos and videos to follow... Rock on.