Dusting off the old to delight your true fans

Posted by: on Dec 18, 2009 | No Comments

I’m a big fan of the classics – not necessarily classical literature or classical music, specifically, but anything that through quality, uniqueness, fan love, and time gains the aura of “a classic.” Be it a vintage hot rod, iconic brand, or a genre-defining product, I am just fascinated by most anything that retains a devoted fan following years, decades, or even centuries after what should have been its useful life.

Companies constantly dust off those classics they have rights to, and either repackage the originals or infuse new products with some defining “classic” elements, to appeal to new and old fans alike. We see it everyday with cars, especially those coming out of a Detroit constantly striving to recapture its old magic. We also see it in music, with covers of old classics by modern bands, or repackaged, remastered originals wrapped up as greatest hit albums.

What’s truly inspiring is when the original classic is redone with an all new light, in such a way that it perfectly delights both new and old fans. From the world of music – classic rock specifically – the acoustic or “unplugged” remakes of the old classics “Layla” (Eric Clapton) and “Hotel California” (Don Henley/The Eagles) embody this perfectly.

Just listen to those songs, and especially the live fan reactions when they were first performed, and try not to get the chills. In both cases, the original musicians tease with an intro that maybe hints at what the song will be, but never quite tips off the audience (except maybe that one guy in the back of the room who starts hooting in joy far to early). Then they play some defining cord that fully and dramatically gives away the song.

The audience reaction is electric, even if the instruments are not. In both songs, once the fans realize what they’re listening to, they scream in delight both at hearing an old favorite and at experiencing it in an entirely new way.

Both Layla and Hotel California are immensely popular classics. They have been packaged up, remastered, and resold countless ways over the years. Fans have bought up greatest hits albums and re-releases of the original tracks by the millions.

Even then, when you would expect fan fatigue to set it at least a bit, Clapton and the Eagles dusted the classics off and reinvented them completely, risking the ire of the purists yet delighting so many more while introducing the songs to entirely new generation of fans.

What’s the marketing lesson in this? If you happen to be lucky enough to be stewards of a classic, by all means keep exploring ways to continue to sell it to fans both old and new. Just don’t be afraid of reinventing it, even at the expense of purists, to give it a whole new life.

Community is great, just don’t start with a crap product

Posted by: on Nov 19, 2009 | 4 Comments

With so much focus these days on how companies can leverage great branding, marketing, and social media to build a passionate customer community, I think a pretty simple underlying truth tends to get overshadowed:

It all starts with a great product.

And not just a technically sound, decent quality, reasonably well designed product. But one that truly and deeply impresses. Three years ago on my personal blog I wrote this:

I don’t want their [customers'] reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, UI more AJAXified. I don’t want them to pause to analyze the boring feature comparison chart on the back of the box.

I want “f**king cool!” Period.

Look at all the chatter on Twitter from the WOMMA event in Vegas right now – the Marketing VP (Rob Bondurant) from Patagonia apparently just presented, and shared wonderful nuggets of wisdom along with a bunch of stories about how vibrant and passionate their community is.

If their products were just average, do you think Rob would have been on stage at WOMMA? No way. For all the cool stuff Patagonia has done to build their brand identity and encourage and cultivate their fans (and it’s seriously impressive), their success all starts with developing kick ass products that customers don’t just like, they adore.

So learn all you can about great marketing. Listen to smart people with great experiences to share. Sharpen your skills around supporting and fostering customer evangelists.

But be damn sure your product or service is awesome first. It all starts with that.

*Photo from the Patagonia home page, hoping they don’t mind the compliment.

MMO corpse spam proves you cannot hide from marketing

Posted by: on Nov 17, 2009 | No Comments

Found via a post over on Virtual Economics (“The growing value of URLs you can easily spell out in dead bodies“), I have to give a hat tip to the spammers (ahem, marketers) behind this little innovation in our field:

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) [in World of Warcraft] and you’ll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground.

Yes, all those little red and purple spots in the above photo are, in fact, player character corpses from WoW. Seems to be a rather creative new way to promote websites within the game – just get a ton of accounts, kill off each character in a specific location, and I assume use another character to maneuver the dead bodies into letters to spell out your favorite domain name.

Though yes, it’s spam, I have to say I’m impressed. This is a serious step up from sticking a useless character in a game town square and having him scream out sales pitches to every player that strolls by. I have no idea if it’s effective or not, but these guys get an “A” for the effort.

*screenshot via Virtual Economics

Where Ivar’s thumbed a barnacle at transparency, and it worked

Posted by: on Nov 16, 2009 | No Comments

“He has been called the greatest self-promoter in the history of Seattle.” So said the Seattle Times this past September about Ivar Haglund, the founder of the Ivar’s seafood restaurant chain. The article goes on to describe the “discovery” of a barnacle encrusted billboard in the waters of Puget Sound out in front of downtown Seattle, supposedly put there in the 1950′s by a very forward looking Mr. Haglund.

He apparently foresaw the coming of a future of cross-Sound underwater ferries and a wonderful opportunity to promote his 75 cent cups of chowder. A local historian even chimed in, citing documents discovered in the company’s archives which supported the authenticity and hinted their might be more submerged billboards yet to be found.

A fantastic story, one which perfectly supported the Ivar brand, and garnered reams of local press coverage – and a 5-10% uptick in customer volume in the middle of a major recession.

Of course, it was all a hoax. A masterful joke played on the public, and the local media, by the crew at Ivar’s, the aforementioned local historian, and a local ad agency named Heckler Associates.

In this age of authenticity and transparency, was Ivar’s wrong in running with this oddball marketing campaign? After all, this wasn’t just some creative misdirection, or a hidden sponsor of some viral video. The company flat out lied, and even pulled in a credible historian to lie for them.

Shouldn’t they suffer some blowback or tarnish to their otherwise feel good reputation?

In this case, I’d have to say no. In an odd way, this blatant lie in support of a marketing campaign adds more to the Ivar’s brand – that of blatant, over-the-top, and creative ways to push some tasty clam chowder – than any wholly transparent social media or marketing effort I can think of.

The lie, in effect, makes them more authentic. Genius in its own way.

Photo via the linked Seattle Times article.