Marketing Speak

A kitchen table is like a round table, except that it doesn't have to be round. The only requirement is animated conversation and maybe a bowl of cereal. When Seth Godin sat down and put his ideas forth at Redwood's kitchen table, he kick-started a wide-ranging discussion about branded content, innovative ideas and permission marketing. Rick Wolfe, a specialist at nurturing focused conversations, moderated the session.

The players at the table were:

Rick Wolfe Moderator
Seth Godin "Prime Minister of Permission Marketing"
Richard McLaughlin Royal Bank of Canada
Gannon Jones Kraft Foods
Rami Lippa Redwood, Vice-President & Co-Creative Director
Don Barnes Redwood, Vice-President of Strategic Planning

(The conversation has been edited for space.)

Seth: You have to be content-based marketers. I don't think most people here would identify themselves that way.

Gannon (Kraft): Five years ago we had a bit of an epiphany, which can best be summarized by the statement, "if you do what you’ve always done, you'll get what you’ve always gotten." For us, that was declining sales... So we embarked on a solutions program, on content. I think we've been very successful. And now, we're beginning to see a lot of companies out there starting to get into the content game. Many of them haven't yet truly cracked the role that brands need to play in content... but in the next five years I think we'll see a lot more of them getting it.

Seth: My point is that most people are indifferent and invisible to you and you're invisible to them. The people who have any prayer of actually doing business with you are the ones who want something new. It’s the 10 per cent who are looking for something new, they’re the only ones you have a chance on.

Rami (Redwood): I think the average person, when they see where things are going, will follow in time.

Richard (RBC): What we have found is that if you try to market in a broad sense, in our category, you end up with mush. And nobody can tell the difference between [competitors]. Where it becomes relevant for us is when we can get down to a subset. For example, we put together a bundle of products that would appeal to the unique needs of people entering the medical or dental schools. Before we started last year, we had a one per cent share in that little subset. With last year’s effort, which we would consider — from a marketing budget — a rounding error, we went from one per cent to 29 per cent.

Gannon: The majority of our organization was raised in the mass-marketing television mentality and it still pervades our organization and, I suspect, most mass-marketing organizations. Recently a few of us were in a meeting with a brand group looking to launch a new product next year. It's a phenomenal product... but one with a very niche target. They have a beer-sized budget in terms of advertising support, and their first instinct is to blast their message out across mass television.

Most of us are still very much structured around the brand. And a brand manager is [encouraged] to take their product and sell it to as many people as possible. Our approach is to flip that on its head by taking an individual consumer and attempting to market the breadth of our portfolio, maximize the breadth of our portfolio, to that one individual based on our understanding of their unique needs. But that's still a foreign concept to many marketers.

Don (Redwood): I think there are a lot of people in this room who are thinking the way Seth talked today. But we’re still doing it in the context of these mass marketers who are a long way away. So there's a lot of educating to be done.

Seth: With very few exceptions, it's the new companies that are figuring it out.

Don: That's because they have nothing to lose.

Seth: Think about it: Why doesn't Maxwell House own Starbucks? Why doesn't A&P own Whole Foods Markets? Starbucks is worth 50 times the Maxwell House brands. Tiny little Whole Foods is worth more than A&P if they were both for sale. They blew it. And every one of you has [a competitor] who's got nothing to lose who's on the same path.

Richard: I think the challenge for us will be that we have to innovate our content... faster than anybody else. And if we do that in the little sub-segments I talked about, then you take that little sub-segment and make it a bigger one, then bigger, then bigger. Then you work your way into the middle of that curve. Most of the people who are higher-income, higher net worth people don't want to spend time managing their finances. They want to know that it's being taken care of. And I think that's where the content comes in for us. How do we find content that's relevant so we can tell those stories? It is about telling stories, absolutely.

Rami: And every brand has a different way of talking. That's the most interesting challenge, to find that special tone of voice that will really talk to those people. Because if you miss the mark, they're really not interested. One of the ways to do that is to get to know the particular values that pertain to those people that you're talking to. What makes them interested in the first place? Why do they allow you to talk to them in the first place? Which is to your point, Seth. It's about getting their permission.

Richard: We bought a bank in the southeastern United States and we discovered that a lot of people who spend their summers in Canada and winters down south had a whole lot of problems. If they wanted to transfer $10,000, they had to go to a bank and request a transfer, and then any time over the next three weeks the transfer would happen at whatever the exchange rate was on that day. That's the most terrifying thing for someone at that stage of life. So we were able to [provide a service to] transfer the money the same day at a guaranteed rate. Pretty simple and straightforward, but wildly innovative in an industry that doesn’t deal in innovation.

Seth: In my new book, the term I'm using is "worldview." If you frame your story in terms of someone's worldview, they will believe you. If it's not framed in terms of their worldview, it bounces off them like a bulletproof vest. You've done a great job with the snowbirds. Their worldview is they care about every penny. And the framing of the story is not that it's faster or more efficient, just that you know the answer. We're going to tell you the exchange rate and you'll know it. So words like "knowledge" and "security" and "guarantee" will resonate with their worldview.

Gannon: I think the comment of the worldview is a good one. A lot of companies haven't figured out what their customers' worldview is relative to their business. Another point I'd like to make is on the subject of measurement. It's a tremendous challenge as we enter into new, non-traditional spaces. It's the age-old question, "How do I know this is working?" It's one of the reasons television and other traditional media are sticking around in our organization, because at least with television I can spend my dollar and know what I'm getting. It may be going down year after year, but at least I know. But put out a magazine about food solutions... how does one measure that? Intuitively, it certainly felt right for us — after all, consumers don't wake up and say, "what shall I do with my Miracle Whip today?" — but they may think about dinner, or lunch... Luckily we had a CEO who said, "I don’t care if I can't measure this, this is the right thing to do." But not every organization has that. Measurement for us, and I suspect for many companies moving into non-traditional tactics, is going to be one of the single biggest challenges. If I'm channeling millions of dollars from television and other vehicles, the organization is going to expect that you can evaluate it. Building relationships with consumers is a long-term proposition. It's an investment. If you expect to put out a message and see a huge impact overnight you will likely be disappointed.

Seth: I'm clarifying something here and it's controversial, but I think everyone here can benefit: You should refuse to measure. All of us at the forefront have been telling a story to our bosses that they want to hear: "This works and we can measure it." But guess what? You've never measured television! Never once. You spent billions of dollars on TV — you're not measuring it! So I'm not going to measure this either. Just because I can measure it doesn't mean I should. Because the measurement will look real, so you'll assume it's real, but it's not because it's not getting all the secondary information.

Moderator: There was a sign on Einstein's office wall that said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Richard: Yeah, but (laughter)... Absolutely, the television comment is bang on. It will never be properly measured. When you're in a situation like us where you have a database and you can measure, I can tell you that every dollar that I spend in direct is exactly what I get back. And I can do the same in this world and we are doing the same with the work we do here [with Redwood].

Seth: But, see, no, I disagree. You don't know what happened at the coffee table and you don't know what happened at the beauty parlour. There's a difference between sending a credit-card solicitation and measuring it, and telling a complicated story using a bunch of tools and measuring the ripple effect. And they can't measure that and you can't measure when you do something with these guys. So it's not fair.

[At this point, Rick Wolfe directed a series of mini kitchen tables. At each of these, a mixture of Redwood's clients and Redwood staff from both account and creative tackled the many topics raised throughout the afternoon.]