In a song, what's more important, the words or the music?

I think most people would agree that the music is more important. 

Take "Moon River," first sung by Audrey Hepburn in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The song itself won an Academy Award for composers Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, one of four won by Mercer.

Later, Andy Williams adopted "Moon River" as his theme song. Here is the first verse.
 

Moon river, wider than a mile

I'm crossin' you in style some day

Old dream maker, you heartbreaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way
 

Johnny Mercer, in my opinion, was the best lyricist of the 20th century, but I'm sure those words on a piece of paper, even repeated millions of times, would not have made "Moon River" famous.

It was the music that made the words "Moon River" famous. Advertising needs visuals in the same way that lyrics need music, if you want to drive your words into the minds of your prospects. Without a visual hammer, an advertising campaign is almost certain to fail.

Years ago, we were making a new-business presentation, and I could see it wasn't going over very well. Wherever we were going, the prospect wasn't going our way.

Finally he said, "Your advertising is all visually oriented, and today the trend is towards verbally oriented advertising."
 

He was right. The number of advertisers today that are totally focused on a verbal approach is staggering.

Even a visual medium like TV is often used primarily in a verbal way. Take a recent Ford F-150 commercial. Here is what was used for both the voice-over and, unbelievably, the text on screen:
 

"ALL RIGHT, SO YOU'RE DRIVING DOWN THE FREEWAY DOING ABOUT 60 WHEN YOU NOTICE THE GUY NEXT TO YOU IS STEERING WITH HIS KNEES, EATING A CHEESEBURGER AND TALKING ON THE PHONE, AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHY THE ALL-NEW '09 F-150 IS THE SAFEST TRUCK IN AMERICA. IT'S GOT HIGH-STRENGTH STEEL SAFETY CAGE, SIDE-IMPACT AIR BAGS, SAFETY CANOPY, 5-STAR CRASH RATING AND ROLL STABILITY CONTROL. BECAUSE IT'S NOT JUST CRAZY OUT THERE, IT'S CERTIFIABLY INSANE. OK IT'S NOT JUST ANY TRUCK, IT'S THE 2009 MOTOR TREND TRUCK OF THE YEAR."
 

My guess is that this verbal diarrhea turns off more truck buyers than it turns on. But who am I to complain? If the advertising is so bad, why is the Ford F-Series the largest-selling vehicle in the U.S.? Momentum. Ford's F-Series has been the best-selling vehicle of any kind in the United States for 33 consecutive years.
 

But just because an advertisement has a visual doesn't turn that visual into a hammer. Most visuals are what we call a "rebus," a picture that stands for a word.
 

Take a Chevrolet Malibu ad with the headline: "By definition an Accord is a compromise." The picture is a rebus which stands for "Chevrolet Malibu." It doesn't hammer the words "an Accord is a compromise" into a reader's mind.
 

When developing a marketing strategy, verbally oriented left-brainers spend most of their time trying to find the best words to describe the brand's position. "Honda's Accord is the chief competitor for our Chevy Malibu," goes the thinking, "so let's nail them with the compromise idea."
 

But those words don't translate into a visual hammer, so they are virtually useless as an advertising concept. Look at the difference between the Malibu ad and what Verizon has been doing recently.
 

For years, No. 1 Verizon and No. 2 AT&T have been blasting each other with massive amounts of advertising. A typical Verizon slogan: "Switch to America's largest and most reliable 3G network."
 

For most consumers this slogan was just "we're-the-biggest-and-the-best" advertising puffery. Nor did the slogan lend itself to a visual hammer.
 

Then last October Verizon launched its "There's a map for that" campaign. Its commercials showed two U.S. maps, one marked "Verizon Wireless," the other marked "AT&T." The caption: "5X more 3G coverage." 
 

Verizon's coverage is almost solid red on a white map. AT&T's coverage is very spotty blue areas on a white map. In other words, with Verizon you get five times as much 3G coverage. That's what I mean by a powerful visual hammer.
 

You know the campaign is working because of what AT&T is doing in response. Soon after the Verizon campaign was launched, AT&T struck back with "When you compare, there's no comparison" and a new website, TruthAbout3G.com. Unfortunately, the ads are all words:
 

"Nation's fastest 3G network."

"Talk and surf the web at the same time."

"Most popular smartphones." (Translation: We've got the iPhone. They don't.)

"Access to over 100,000 apps." (The iPhone again.)
 

Now who do you suppose is winning the wireless war? My bet would be on Verizon. A visual campaign will always be more persuasive than a verbal campaign.
 

Tested 72 hours after exposure, people remember only about 10% of information presented orally, according to one study, but 65% of information presented visually.
 

There's a paradox here. The objective of a marketing campaign is to own a word in the mind. "Driving" in the case of BMW. "Safety" in the case of Volvo. "Change" in the case of Barack Obama. Logical left-brainers are quick to assume that the best way to do that is jump on the word verbally and then to lay out the verbal reasons why -- much like a lawyer's brief.
 

Hence the AT&T campaign: "When you compare, there's no comparison."
 

Do words like these mean much to consumers? I think not. The assumption is that you can say anything, but a picture is proof. Hence the Verizon campaign: "There's a map for that."

Verizon's coverage maps are powerful visual hammers. Nothing is as powerful in marketing as a combination of a simple verbal nail ("the real thing") and a powerful visual hammer (the contours of the Coke bottle). You have probably noticed how Coca-Cola is making extensive use of its unique visual in packaging and marketing even though very few contour bottles of Coke are now being sold.

It's not just advertising that is so verbally oriented. What is striking to me is how verbally oriented many company presentations are. It's not uncommon for a corporate executive to stand behind a podium reading a speech on a teleprompter while the same words appear on a huge screen with absolutely no visuals.
 

I recently saw a 50-slide presentation by a world-renowned management consulting firm on an issue of international importance. The slides contained nothing but words -- some 2,000 words, according to my rough calculations.
 

Compare that with a presentation by Steve Jobs, everyone's choice as the world's most effective communicator. In June of 2008, Steve Jobs announced the introduction of the iPhone 3G. He used 11 slides to do so, but only one slide contained words. The other 10 slides were photographs.
 

Look at PowerPoint, the presentation program of choice for most executives. My daughter Laura and I use the program because we think we have no other choice, but the slide masters are totally useless because they are all verbally oriented and our slides are almost all visually oriented, with very few words.
 

Wherever you're goin', you'll go faster and farther with a visual hammer. What good are the words without the music?
 

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

It’s Academy Award season again, and movie buffs everywhere await the results of the annual competition.

So how did Hollywood's beloved Oscar, the 8-pound gold statuette get its name?

Most awards nicknames have obvious sources. For instance, 

• The Tony Awards on Broadway are nicknamed in honor of actress/director Antoinette Perry, who died in 1946. The Tony Awards began the next year.

• The Grammy Awards, given by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, are a diminutive of "gramophone,” coined way back in 1887 to describe a device to record and reproduce sound. (Gramophone was a trademark based on the inversion of “phonogram.”) AsVariety tells the story, there was discussion in 1958 of calling the award the “Eddy,” to honor Thomas Edison. But the name “Grammy” prevailed, backed by Academy governors such as Elmer Bernstein and Stan Freberg.

• Television’s Emmy Awards get their moniker from a pioneer TV engineer and the third president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He suggested “Immy,” a term commonly used around 1950 for the early image orthicon camera. The name stuck and was later modified to Emmy, which was considered more appropriate for a female symbol.

But the origin of Oscar, as the award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is commonly known, is shrouded in showbiz lore. Consider:

• In its earliest years (1929-1933), the award – a naked knight standing on a reel of film with his hands gripping a sword – was simply called “The Statue.”

• In 1934, a Hollywood columnist supposedly used the name “Oscar” in referring to the Best Actress award to Katherine Hepburn. He said he invented the nickname to deflate the “pretension” of the ceremony.

• Walt Disney is also reported to have called it by that name in the same year at the Awards ceremony.

• The most popular story about the name's origin involves the Academy’s librarian and future executive director. The story goes that, upon seeing the statuette sitting on a table, she exclaimed, “It looks just like my Uncle Oscar!" The staff began jokingly referring to the statue as "Oscar” and by 1939, that was the official name.

• The best story of all? According to the TV program Myths and Legends, the name came from actress Bette Davis (pictured above). Upon receiving her first Academy Award, she took a glance at the little gold man’s rear end, and said something like, "It looks like Oscar's derriere!" (She was referring to her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson.) His later wife, Anne Nelson, substantiated this story, and even agreed about the likeness of the buttocks.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Is Moody Blue a better name for a flavor than Glacier Freeze? How will consumers react to a color named Razzmatazz instead of Bright Orange? And what’s wrong with good old Fire Engine Red? 

Two marketing professors have been studying these shades of meaning and publishing provocative papers on color-coding and what it does to buyers’ expectations. So we went to Barbara E. Kahn (at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) and Elizabeth G. Miller (at Boston College) for some answers. 

Q: Is there anything wrong with good old “Fire Engine Red” to identify a nail polish? 

We find in our research that consumers tend to react positively to ambiguous names and specific, unexpected names. If Fire Engine Red is surprising to consumers, then they will react more positively to it. If it’s not, then it’s similar to just calling it “red.” 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this description, but with the multitude of choices that a consumer faces every day, marketers are increasingly looking for ways to stand out and coming out with an unusual name is one way. 

Q: You have commented that it’s astonishing when Crayola comes out with names that don’t describe the color of crayons. Why so? 

Well, usually the point of a color name on the side of a crayon is to describe the color hue or shade. At least that’s the way it was when we were kids! So it was a surprise to see a list of Crayola color names that were not descriptive. But in fact, when you think about it, if a child is holding the crayon in his or her hand, then s/he does know the color, and the name could indeed be whimsical. 

Q: If a color or flavor name is not particularly descriptive – like “Voltage” – will the consumer react in a positive way? 

Depends. What we found is that for some categories like candy or sweaters where the exact color or flavor need not be precise, having an ambiguous name makes the consumer stop and think – and that extra attention, that extra elaboration about the product, on the margin gives a boost to the product – which we have found to be positive. Although we did not find it in our research, one could imagine situations where there is some risk in not knowing the exact color or flavor, and then having an ambiguous name would not be positive. 

Q: Then why would someone prefer an ambiguous name over a name with built-in meaning? 

In our research, we found that when a consumer encountered an ambiguous name, s/he stopped and thought about it a little. And given that the information came from a marketer who is likely only to give positive information about the product, the consumer is apt to assume the information embedded in the name implies something positive about the brand. On the margin, this assumption about positive attributes adds value to the product. 

Q: You have written about the consumer becoming “engaged” in solving the “puzzle” of a name. Is this speculation on your part, or is it based on the way our minds actually operate? 

People like the world to make sense. So when they encounter surprising information, they try to make sense of it. 

We found some evidence in our research of this process. When the name was not ambiguous but was just unusual, but in fact descriptive, then the consumer got some pleasure out of solving the “puzzle.” For example, when we presented sweaters that were the color of “coke red” – consumers enjoyed thinking about the unusual color description that in fact did identify the color. 

Q: What about product categories that don’t rely on the sense of taste or smell? What happens then with wild and offbeat names? 

Our research didn’t cover those areas. 

Q: There was once a popcorn candy named “Screaming Yellow Zonkers” that got attention because of its wacky name. But sales stalled. Do colors or flavors such as “Deep Throat” or “Orgasm” have any real point of difference other than their edgy names? 

Ambiguous names do prompt additional thought which can lead to increased preference, but such effects are unlikely to compensate for a bad product. In addition, when a consumer gets used to the name it is unlikely to continue to offer the advantages we are talking about.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

I have attended numerous industry meetings and have heard numerous industry spokespeople make numerous speeches and except in the speeches given by my daughter, myself or my former partner Jack Trout, I have never heard someone say, the secret to creating a powerful brand is to be first.

It’s a message that marketing people don’t want to hear. They think that it downgrades the marketing function. They think it implies that marketing doesn’t matter. That all you need to do to be successful is to be first. 

Too many marketing people hear only the first half of the message. The importance of being first. They don’t hear the second half. What we mean by being first. What we mean is being first in the mind, not in the marketplace.

Anybody can be first. It takes good marketing thinking to get into the mind first.

As a matter of fact, being first is worth nothing. Being first in the mind is worth everything. This is the essence of creating a brand.

In our investigation of brands, very few leading brands were literally ever first. Usually there were a few mis-starts before someone figured out how to get into the consumer’s mind.

Duryea built the first automobile in America, but the brand never got into the mind. Ford was the first brand in the mind (and is still the leading automobile brand in America today.)

Du Mont built the first television set in America, but the brand never got into the mind.

Hurley built the first washing machine in America, but the brand never got into the mind.

When you look around the world, you find many brands like Duryea, Du Mont and Hurley. First in their categories, but not first in the mind. What could have been big winners turn out to be modest successes at best.

Take Krating Daeng, a popular health tonic in Thailand. The product is a lightly-carbonated, highly-caffeinated concoction containing liberal quantities of herbs, B-complex vitamins and amino acids. But it wasn’t anyone in Thailand that took the concept and built a worldwide brand. It was an Austrian named Dietrich Mateschitz who discovered the drink and saw its potential.

A temptation that’s hard to resist is to give a new category an ‘exotic’ name. Mateschitz could have bought the rights to the name ‘Krating Daeng’, for example. Or perhaps he could have called the new drink, ‘Thailand Tea’. 

What Mateschitz actually did was to call his Asian compound, ‘an energy drink’. As it happens, the first energy drink. As a brand name, he picked Red Bull, an English variation of Krating Daeng. 

Simple names work best when defining a new category. Not only is ‘energy drink’ a simple name, it also benefits from an analogy with PowerBar, the first ‘energy bar’.

Marketing can be visualized as ‘filling an empty hole in the mind’. If there’s a category called ‘energy bar’, the consumer thinks, there must be a category called energy drink (Red Bull.) Or sports drink (Gatorade) or fitness drink (Propel.) 

Energy drink works as a category name even though there is little relationship between the ingredients in a can of Red Bull and the ingredients in energy bars like PowerBar, Balance bar, Clif bar and Atkins bar.

Marketing people are sometimes too literal when they try to dream up a name for a new category. What matters most is not describing the benefits of the new category, but expressing the essence of the new category in as simple a way as possible.

After all, Red Bull became a powerful brand because it is perceived as a drink that improves performance especially during times of increased stress or strain, which some people take to mean sexual performance. (‘Energy’ is just a way of expressing that idea in a socially-acceptable way.)

Red Bull has become a runaway success. Worldwide sales are now more than $2.1 billion a year. 

The real question is, why didn’t somebody in Thailand do what Dietrich Mateschitz did? Or somebody at Coca-Cola in Atlanta? Or somebody at PepsiCo in Purchase, New York? 

The truth is, the folks at the established soft-drink companies were too busy trying to squeeze the last ounce of value out of their existing brands. That’s why there are now 14 different varieties of Coca-Cola. (Marketing people spend 95 percent of their time on brand maintenance when the real opportunities lie in brand creation.)

Then there’s the iPod, the brand that turned around Apple Computer. 

But Apple wasn’t the first MP3 player with a disk drive. The iPod was first sold in retail stores in America on November 11, 2001. More than a year earlier (in July 2000), Creative Technology Ltd., a Singapore company, was selling the Creative Nomad Jukebox, an MP3 player with a disk drive, in the U.S. market. Furthermore, the Jukebox had a 6-gigabyte hard drive versus only 5 gigabytes for the initial iPod.

The Creative Nomad Jukebox got into the market first, but not into the mind first. 

It didn’t have a chance to get into the mind because the company made a number of marketing mistakes. Let’s look at some of them.

1. Line extension. Creative Technology was already selling two other MP3 players. The Creative Nomad II and the Creative Nomad II MG (magnesium case.) 

Both of these products had a 64-megabyte flash memory which meant they could hold only about 20 songs instead of the thousands that a disk drive could hold. 

In other words, the disk-drive MP3 player is a totally separate category. Using the Creative name on both categories causes confusion that undermines the brand-building process.

2. A generic name. Even worse, ‘Creative’ is a descriptive, generic name. You can’t build a brand with a generic name. You need a brand name. 

What’s a brand name? It’s a manufactured name like iPod, or a generic name used out of context. (Apple doesn’t sell apples.) And there are a host of other criteria to determine whether or not a given name would make a good brand name or not.

3. A long, complicated name. Compare ‘Creative Nomad Jukebox’ (7 syllables) versus ‘iPod’ (2 syllables.)

If you want to build a worldwide brand in today’s overcommunicated marketplace, you need a short, simple brand name. (Red Bull is also two syllables.)

Keep in mind that for a brand name to become truly successful, it needs to become the nickname for the category. Nobody calls the category ‘hard-disk-drive MP3 players’. They call them ‘iPods’, even the iPods are made by other manufacturers. That’s another reason a name like Creative Nomad Jukebox would never work.

4. A lack of focus. In addition to making MP3 players, Creative Technology also makes a host of other products. The Creative Zen Portable Media Center (another terrible brand name), digital cameras, graphic accelerator cards, modems, CD and DVD drives, PC speakers, audio chips and electronic musical instruments. 

Did Creative Technology see the potential of the disk-drive MP3 player? Probably not, or they would have dropped everything to focus on this product.

Look at Nokia, the world’s fifth most valuable brand. Nokia wasn’t the first company to introduce a cellphone. The first company to introduce a cellphone was Motorola. 

Nor was Dell the first company to introduce a 16-bit business personal computer. The first company to introduce such a product was IBM.

Yet Motorola lost out to Nokia in cellphones for the same reason that IBM lost out to Dell in personal computers. Nokia meant cellphone and Motorola meant a wide range of products from communications equipment to global satellite systems.

Oddly enough, Nokia used to make a wide range of products: paper, rubber products including tires & boots, electronics, machinery and personal computers. But Nokia dropped everything in order to focus on cellphones. 

Creative Technology should have done the same.
 
Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

We're traveling around, finding interesting people and asking them to riff for a minute or two about what makes someone indispensable. Kicking off the weekly series is Gary Vee. Click the picture to view it. We'll do four for February and see how it goes.

Linchpin: GaryVee from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense. 

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser--for a while--if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
• Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
• Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you've probably already seen it. If not, here it is.

Todd Sattersten has written a free ebook about pricing that's well worth the time it takes to review. It will change the way you think about pricing.

And if you can, take a look at this poetry video from Gabrielle Bouliane. She left us a very powerful message before she left. It might change your life. (Thanks Paul).

The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn't ship and most of all, busywork.

These represent safety, because if you don't challenge the status quo, you can't be made fun of, can't fail, can't be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything.

I'd like to posit that for idea workers, misusing Twitter, Facebook and various forms of digital networking are the ultimate expression of procrastination. You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger your circle, the more connections are available.

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

"Honey, how was your day?"

"Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy."

"I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?"

Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn't mean mattered.

When the resistance pushes you to do the quick reaction, the instant message, the 'ping-are-you-still-there', perhaps it pays to push in precisely the opposite direction. Perhaps it's time for the blank sheet of paper, the cancellation of a long-time money loser, the difficult conversation, the creative breakthrough...

Or you could check your email.