Posted by truecreek on March 24, 2010 under More Dam News | 
There are times when no amount of advertising and marketing can pull you up from the floor. The issues facing Toyota right now are monumental in their entirety and really do have the potential to damage the brand beyond recognition. We’re talking years here, I believe.
USA Today: Yet another survey points to bad news for Toyota: A pollster says findings show Toyota has crushed its quality reputation.
In two short years, Americans having a positive perception of Toyota’s commitment to building quality cars has plummeted to 21.8% from over 80%, according to the findings of the latest survey by Britt Beemer at the BeemerReport.com
Only 31.8% of Americans believe Toyota can rebuild its quality image, the verdict is still out about their ability to recover. Some 22.1% are undecided whether they can rebuild the quality image and 18% don’t think Toyota will be able to do it.
“While their reputation is on the line, Toyota’s problems don’t stop there because buyers are now wary of the Toyota brand,” says Beemer. “Toyota has some real selling to do just to convince current Toyota car owners to buy another one.”
But will current Toyota owners save the day?
Maybe, the survey finds. The survey revealed that consumers who have purchased Toyotas in the past are evenly divided about whether they will buy another one in the future or not. Of these potential buyers, 52.6% will no longer consider buying a Toyota car in the future.
American car manufacturers may ultimately be the benefactors of Toyota’s quality issues, according to Beemer. Due to Toyota’s quality issues, 69.1% of car buyers are more likely to purchase an American made automobile. That number is up from 38% two years ago.
The survey comes from 1,000 telephone interviews conducted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, March 12, 13 and 14, 2010, at ARG headquarters in Charleston, SC. The error factor is plus or minus 3.8%.
Posted by truecreek on October 26, 2009 under More Dam News |
AP:
The decline in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating as the industry continues to struggle with reader defections to the Internet and tumbling ad revenue.
New figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that average daily circulation dropped 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month span in 2008.
That’s greater than the 7.1 percent decline in the October-March period.
Sunday circulation fell 7.5 percent.
As expected, The Wall Street Journal has surpassed USA Today as the top-selling newspaper in the United States.
Newspaper sales have been declining since the early 1990s, but the drop has accelerated in recent years. Circulation revenue has largely held up, though, because of price increases.
Posted by truecreek on August 28, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Great article from Milan Martin. He speaks of the truth. If cultures don’t mesh well, it’s going to be a challenging creative business relationship. Been there and done that.
By Milan Martin
For the past several months, we’ve been in the throes of a pitch. A big pitch. We really wanted to work with this client, so we threw ourselves into it. Multiple creative teams across several offices, customer focus groups, brand videos — the whole nine yards.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about pitching over the years it’s that you absolutely have to show your true colors. With this pitch, we went to great lengths to give these prospective clients a taste of what life would really be like for them if they chose us.
When they visited our agency, did we take them to Chez Francois for lunch? No. We had Shake Shack brought in. Double cheeseburgers, black-and-white shakes and fries. On paper plates. Because that’s us. We’re burger-eating, jeans-wearing, show-you-an-idea-even-if-it’s-not-completely-baked-yet kind of people. And that doesn’t work for everyone.
Misrepresenting your agency culture or your personality in a pitch would be like convincing a beautiful girl to marry you based on your common love for Michael Bolton. You may have won her hand, but you’ve got a lifetime of Michael Bolton ahead of you. And if you weren’t a Michael Bolton fan to begin with, the thrill of “victory” will soon fade with each rendition of “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
On the same token, we asked as much from them. How do you see agencies in the context of your marketing organization? What would your current agency say about you? Talk to us about how you like to work. SHOW us a day in the life!
So throughout the pitch process, we made several visits to this prospect’s corporate headquarters. It was a nice building in a corporate park in suburban New Jersey. At first glance, nothing out of the ordinary. But each time we drove into the parking lot we noticed something strange: large groups of people in business suits walking in gang-style through the parking lot, some engaged in gregarious conversation with each other, some more stoically focused on some unknown mission.
We never really said anything to each other about it, but each of us, we later found out, was trying to imagine where these people were walking to. To us city folk, we can’t imagine not having at least two Starbucks within a half-block walk, so maybe these poor suburbanites were walking to the closest Starbucks, three miles down the road. Or were they on a “Blues Brothers”-style mission from God?
The big pitch day came and went. Two questions rested heavy on our minds. Did we do everything we could to win? And where the hell were all those people in the parking lot going?
Well, we won the business, and in our first, much more casual, immersion meeting with these great, shiny, new clients, they opened the floor to us for questions. At this point, one of our account guys raised his hand with a furrowed brow. “Here we go,” I’m anticipating, “a smart question, maybe about the detail behind their segmentation or their CRM program.”
“So, uh, yeah. Where are all the people in the parking lot walking to?”
Keep in mind, the contract’s not even signed at this point, so for a brief moment in time I was a little worried our first question of this newly christened relationship wasn’t more … strategic.
“Where do you think they’re going?” the head client responded with a grin.
(“Don’t say mission from God. … Don’t say mission from God.”)
After a minute or two of us awkwardly trying to guess, they finally revealed that it was simply a part of their corporate culture. They drive to and from work, have desk jobs and work long hours — this just gets their heart rates up for a few minutes a day.
Logical enough.
As luck would have it, just then our new clients realized that this was their team’s scheduled “walk” time. “You want to see our culture, do you?” the head client offered. So off we went. Walking. Around the parking lot. In 91-degree heat.
And you know what? It was an amazing way to get to know each other, cut through the formality established by the oak in the conference room and have a “date” out of school. One last chance — for both parties — to “speak now or forever hold their peace” (or at least for the length of the contact).
Fortunately, we don’t mind getting a little sweaty. But if we were the type of people that were worried about staining our Louis Vuitton shirts or scuffing our Prada shoes (we’re more Gap kind of people), we wouldn’t exactly fit within their culture.
They invited us into their culture. And we fit into theirs the way they fit into ours (they’re big fans of Shake Shack).
Since then, each time we’ve visited, there’s been time allotted on the agenda for a “walk around the parking lot.”
And so far, it’s a very happy client-agency relationship.
Now, you’ll no doubt ask: “If you had won the business and in that pre-contract meeting found out that you had nothing in common and didn’t really like each other, would your agency have walked away from the deal?”
Maybe, maybe not. I guess it would depend on the severity of the culture riff. But what I will say is that if you’re looking to establish deep, long-standing relationships with your clients, sharing your culture, honestly and openly, in the courting process is critical.
Otherwise, you may be in for a whole lot of Michael Bolton. And nobody wants that.
Posted by truecreek on July 20, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Seth tells it like it is.
By Seth Godin.
Sometimes people push back on posts of mine they don’t like by telling me I’m out of bounds. Somehow, they say, I’ve crossed the boundary of what I’m allowed to write about. They are angry that I’m now writing about something outside my defined area.
I’m usually taken aback by this, because I didn’t realize I’d actually agreed to any boundaries.
Brands run into this all the time. Consumers give them boundaries. Nike isn’t allowed to make a computer, for example (unless they partner with Apple). It turns out, though, that marketers decide to believe in these boundaries a lot more than consumers do.
A beautifully made product or service (one that we agree with) gets a lot of slack, regardless of its source. Virgin is a great example of this. Branson can market cola and airplanes with the same brand, largely because we like what he makes. In Korea, there are a few massive brands that are ‘allowed’ to market anything they like, from dishwashers to cars. Google is allowed to market the very cool new Squares, of course.
The real problem is that when marketers believe they are going out of bounds, the work they do tends to be lousy. Starbucks attempt at chocolate, for example, wasn’t as good at being chocolate as their coffee is at being coffee.I think that’s because the marketers at Starbucks feel they have permission to care about coffee, but chocolate is merely an extension, an additional profit center, not a passion.
I’m not arguing for carte blanche craziness with your brand. American Express can do travelers checks and credit cards and could have done PayPal… but no, they probably shouldn’t launch a line of whiskey any time soon. I am, however, arguing that once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.
