Today's blog is written by Jeff Boedges, partner at SoHo Experiential
My grandma used to say that a man standing in the middle of the road was a man likely to get run over. If that’s the case, there are a lot of people who should be as flat as a pancake by now. You see, if you don’t keep moving toward the other curb, you will be hit, or at best, cause traffic to come to a screeching halt.
Now more that ever, it seems that decisions aren’t being made; people keep looking for something else to learn or waiting for some new opinion to emerge before putting themselves on the line. Frankly, it feels like decisions and commitments simply aren’t being made, and it has now become more acceptable to do nothing than to risk any accountability whatsoever.
Go ask Axle Rose; c’mon, Chinese Democracy? It was okay, but 15 years to make it? The Beatles put out 13 albums in 10!
So, while some write off this paralysis as a sign of the times, owing at least in part to the worst economy since the Great Depression and an uncertain future, my suspicion is that the trend runs deeper; my fear is that decisions are no longer being made because there is always a chance that (gasp) a “wrong” decision might be made!
People! Let’s get over it. No decision is ever perfect; no artwork, no music, no literature, no creative solution to any challenge or opportunity will ever please everyone. Furthermore, nothing really worth doing comes without risk. We can let fear of accountability prevent us from moving forward in our lives, and in our business. What do Albert Einstein and Albert Pujols have in common; besides the fact that they both love schnitzel? Both conduct themselves in their work unafraid to make errors because they knew/know that they will learn as much or more from what they did wrong as from what they did right.
Our mantra at SoHo? “You either win or you learn.”
While wrong turns are an unfortunate fact of life, we should remember that they are rarely permanent (except maybe a certain tattoo I got in Mexico after a night of mescal with the Mrs.) Anyway, if you want to see the definition of ”wrong turn”, take a look at the path Lewis and Clark took to find the Northwest Passage, I think it is entirely possible that Sacagawea was just making it up as she went along.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that whether it be a marketing choice, a life decision or even a political proposal; we need to grant that that imperfection is certain and that we are all in this together. The first solution may not be perfect but the action will produce more learning than all the analysis in the world. Make sure there are no alligators, and jump in. Our lives depend on it.
Jeff
Friday, August 21, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
I’m so tired of this… it’s probably just about to catch on
Back when I was working in the world of not-for-profit theatre in
For two years I ran a company named Mum Puppettheatre which created wordless, movement based puppetry. Marketing this company’s product – again, wordless, movement based puppetry – was not like selling an iPhone; we had a very niche product and customer base, to say the least.
Whatever your views on theater and puppetry are, let it be known that we were a pretty successful company, and artistically well regarded. Much of our financial success, however, came from our annual production of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams – a favorite children’s book of many.
The first year I was there, the Artistic Director said to me, “We’ve been doing this show for five years… I’m starting to get tired of it… I think this will be the last year.” His tune changed dramatically when we broke our box office record by 50%, so he agreed to do it one more year.
“This is definitely the last one – I just can’t do this show anymore,” he said. Ticket sales doubled and box office records were shattered again.
“We just can’t walk away from this – the company needs it to grow,” I would say, “to subsidize all the other stuff we want to do.”
He acquiesced. We made an agreement that the show would be produced every holiday season, but HE would never perform in it again. He would pass it along to others.
I mention this story, because it illustrates a lesson that I run into time and time again, a truth about marketing, advertising and brand communication. That truth?
The moment when you [the marketer] get sick of saying something about your product or brand for the umpteenth time, is usually about the same moment when customers START hearing and embracing it.
So what does this mean? Assuming you do have a quality product or service, there is a customer awareness tipping point that will be reached with patience, repetition and consistent messaging. Take a quick inventory of the brands or companies that you think are the most successful and meaningful, and I think you’ll find that they say the same thing over and over and over again, and have been doing so for a long time. Contrary to that, I think you’ll find that you can’t name too many that change their messaging every 1-2 years, because their message doesn’t have a chance to stand out, and become successful.
Sometimes it is hard as a marketer to have this patience, to say the same thing so many times that it hurts to keep doing it. Given the outsider’s perspective, it is easy for me to remind clients of this fact, but I know it is much harder when looking at your own brand.
After 4 ½ years of running SoHo Experiential, Jeff and I have started reaching this point in the development of our own corporate identity. A few of the quotes that may have been heard between us over the last year:
“I’m sick of our website.”
“Can we please update our capabilities presentation?”
“We need a new logo.”
“I can’t look at you when we present our credentials anymore.”
“Your voice pierces me.”
“What is that thing you are wearing?”
“Do we have a tagline? Do we need one?”
The compulsion to shake things up, to re-brand, is strong. And, at times when business is a little bit slower than normal (thank you 2009 economy), those compulsions grow into an impossible to ignore siren song which calls you to use your free time to give your brand a makeover.
We would discuss the idea of consistency and patience and, frankly, the best way to invest any “makeover” capital, and we had tremendous difficulty getting outside of ourselves. Plus, we still haven’t become a household name (See blog post on June 2 for more on that). At the end of the day we asked our employees and some strategic partners to look at our brand, and tell us what they thought, in order to help us determine, what, if anything we should change.
We learned that we should make some changes, because we weren’t being consistent with our communications. For example, our capabilities presentation said one thing and looked one way, while our website looked another. So, we’ve spent the last six months upgrading our brand to be consistent across the board.
Hence, it is with great pleasure that we are launching our new website, at www.sohoexp.com. We like it, and hope you will too. Our feeling is that it, plus the other updates we’re making, along with consistent messaging over the next few years, will help us hit that tipping point where many customers will know our name, (and how to say it).
In the end, we had to look to others to better see ourselves. Perhaps, like the director at Mum Puppettheatre was tired of performing, we were simply tired of talking about ourselves.
Please enjoy the new website – if you have any feedback on it, please let us know.
Rick
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Where are my learnings?
Depending upon who you are, the subject of this post is either an all too regular question asked of you, or an incorrect answer on a seventh grader’s grammar test. Alas, “learnings” is not a real word, but yet an accepted, and highly utilized component of the marketing lexicon. As a result, I added the word to my Microsoft office spell check dictionary ages ago, as I grew weary of the red squiggly line that would show up in all my program reports.
I’m often curious as to how this word came to be part of marketing speak. Was it not enough share everything we learned from a campaign? Did someone at some point have so many things go wrong with a campaign, that their seriously upset client chided them with something like:
“This thing was so fouled up, you’d better not have just learned, you’d better have had learn-INGS. Lots of learn-INGS. This program was so bad that we need to make plural something that can’t be pluralized, so that you can truly appreciate how messed up this was. I feel like I ran into a school of fish that was so unexpectedly and overwhelmingly HUGE, that I had to yell – 'Holy crap – look at all of those fish-ES!!!!'”
Like a diamond forged in the depths of a fiery volcano, it must have taken a extraordinary event, followed by massive client explosion to bring this phrase to be.
Regardless, I think the word is here to stay, and destined to remain a part of the marketing world as long as it exists.
So you all know, if you try to look up “learnings” in the dictionary, you will not find it. In all likelihood, you will find “learning” and see the following definition (among a few others)
learn⋅ing
–noun
1. knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.
2. the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.
3. Psychology. the modification of behavior through practice, training, or experience.
In marketing, it’s really the first definition that we are focused on; that is, if you are willing to believe marketing is a “scholarly application.” At SoHo we are obsessed with learnings; aiming to improve every minor detail or every event we create. Our goal, of course, is to pay attention to details, ensure that clients know we are on top of our events, accountable for what has occurred, and thinking about how to make things better. We think about learnings all the time; but every time I say it or write it, I laugh quietly to myself because it isn’t a real word.
In researching today’s blog, I stumbled on to a funny website, learnings.org; a site designed to kill corporate buzz words. I had no idea that “learnings” was just the one of many corporate catch phrases that make people shudder just a little when they say or hear them.
Check out www.learnings.org to enjoy some fun with overused and/or ridiculous corporate phrases. My personal favorites are:
• Low Hanging Fruit
• Hit the ground running
• 30,000 foot view, aka helicopter view
• Net-Net
• Listenership
• Final Final
Until next time, enjoy learning people what you’ve read here.
Rick
I’m often curious as to how this word came to be part of marketing speak. Was it not enough share everything we learned from a campaign? Did someone at some point have so many things go wrong with a campaign, that their seriously upset client chided them with something like:
“This thing was so fouled up, you’d better not have just learned, you’d better have had learn-INGS. Lots of learn-INGS. This program was so bad that we need to make plural something that can’t be pluralized, so that you can truly appreciate how messed up this was. I feel like I ran into a school of fish that was so unexpectedly and overwhelmingly HUGE, that I had to yell – 'Holy crap – look at all of those fish-ES!!!!'”
Like a diamond forged in the depths of a fiery volcano, it must have taken a extraordinary event, followed by massive client explosion to bring this phrase to be.
Regardless, I think the word is here to stay, and destined to remain a part of the marketing world as long as it exists.
So you all know, if you try to look up “learnings” in the dictionary, you will not find it. In all likelihood, you will find “learning” and see the following definition (among a few others)
learn⋅ing
–noun
1. knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.
2. the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.
3. Psychology. the modification of behavior through practice, training, or experience.
In marketing, it’s really the first definition that we are focused on; that is, if you are willing to believe marketing is a “scholarly application.” At SoHo we are obsessed with learnings; aiming to improve every minor detail or every event we create. Our goal, of course, is to pay attention to details, ensure that clients know we are on top of our events, accountable for what has occurred, and thinking about how to make things better. We think about learnings all the time; but every time I say it or write it, I laugh quietly to myself because it isn’t a real word.
In researching today’s blog, I stumbled on to a funny website, learnings.org; a site designed to kill corporate buzz words. I had no idea that “learnings” was just the one of many corporate catch phrases that make people shudder just a little when they say or hear them.
Check out www.learnings.org to enjoy some fun with overused and/or ridiculous corporate phrases. My personal favorites are:
• Low Hanging Fruit
• Hit the ground running
• 30,000 foot view, aka helicopter view
• Net-Net
• Listenership
• Final Final
Until next time, enjoy learning people what you’ve read here.
Rick
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
SoHo ExperiMENTAL? What’s That?
ME: Experiential. It’s SoHo ExperiENTIAL.
MOST PEOPLE I MEET: ExperiENTIAL? What’s that?
ME: Like experience. It’s an adjective pertaining to experience.
MPIM: Experiential.
ME: Yep. Take the word experience, drop the CE, and add TIAL to the end.
MPIM: Gotcha. SoHo Experiential.
ME: Yep.
MPIM. Cool… What’s that?
This is an excerpt from nearly every conversation that I have had with anyone I meet that asks me what I do. I tell them about our agency, explaining that we produce consumer experiences that create connections between consumers and brands. They seem intrigued, but this idea still doesn’t quite resonate without some examples. I mention the different types of events that we produce, and it usually isn’t until I mention a common sampling scenario - women handing out free drinks in a bar - that I get a few head nods.
“Ohhhh… ExperIENTIAL!”
As best as I can tell, the idea of experiential marketing seems to have just recently become mainstream among marketers, so I figure we still have a decade or two before a Experiential Marketing is as commonly understood by the general public as Law, Dentistry, or PHP Ninja. That’s a real job – look it up.
On occasion I meet someone who is interested in how an agency works, how we pitch clients, win business, etc. I enrich them with how an agency responds to RFPs, networks with potential clients, and pitches a lot of work on spec. I speak of fitting programs into small client budgets, squeezing margins, and the necessities of executing a test program. I try to explain the common practice of provide clients efficiencies of scale, even when a program is... well... not being executed to scale.
“So… how do you… uhmm…”
“Make Money?” I say, “Well… it’s like fishing… sometimes you won’t catch anything, sometimes you will catch a little one, and on occasion you’ll land a prize winner… but the bait always costs the same.”
I guess you have to like fishing if you are in the agency world.
I recently came across a video that I think perfectly elucidates the agency world and our relationship with clients, in real-world terms that everyone can understand.
All you agency folks should enjoy… clients, maybe not so much ;-)
Until next time!
Rick
MOST PEOPLE I MEET: ExperiENTIAL? What’s that?
ME: Like experience. It’s an adjective pertaining to experience.
MPIM: Experiential.
ME: Yep. Take the word experience, drop the CE, and add TIAL to the end.
MPIM: Gotcha. SoHo Experiential.
ME: Yep.
MPIM. Cool… What’s that?
This is an excerpt from nearly every conversation that I have had with anyone I meet that asks me what I do. I tell them about our agency, explaining that we produce consumer experiences that create connections between consumers and brands. They seem intrigued, but this idea still doesn’t quite resonate without some examples. I mention the different types of events that we produce, and it usually isn’t until I mention a common sampling scenario - women handing out free drinks in a bar - that I get a few head nods.
“Ohhhh… ExperIENTIAL!”
As best as I can tell, the idea of experiential marketing seems to have just recently become mainstream among marketers, so I figure we still have a decade or two before a Experiential Marketing is as commonly understood by the general public as Law, Dentistry, or PHP Ninja. That’s a real job – look it up.
On occasion I meet someone who is interested in how an agency works, how we pitch clients, win business, etc. I enrich them with how an agency responds to RFPs, networks with potential clients, and pitches a lot of work on spec. I speak of fitting programs into small client budgets, squeezing margins, and the necessities of executing a test program. I try to explain the common practice of provide clients efficiencies of scale, even when a program is... well... not being executed to scale.
“So… how do you… uhmm…”
“Make Money?” I say, “Well… it’s like fishing… sometimes you won’t catch anything, sometimes you will catch a little one, and on occasion you’ll land a prize winner… but the bait always costs the same.”
I guess you have to like fishing if you are in the agency world.
I recently came across a video that I think perfectly elucidates the agency world and our relationship with clients, in real-world terms that everyone can understand.
All you agency folks should enjoy… clients, maybe not so much ;-)
Until next time!
Rick
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Getting the Crowd
This week SoHo Experiential is launching the third season of one of our flagship programs, Celebrate The Macallan, a private scotch whisky tasting event featuring The Macallan Scotch Whisky.
It’s events like these that get us excited, because they’ve been proven to work hard for our clients, and the consumers who attend have a great time. Moreover, it reinvigorates the OCD level obsessions of each SoHo team member. Jeff, for example, will be down in Dallas, ensuring that each person at the event implements his “head on a swivel” event management technique, so that the evening will progress flawlessly. Yaz will likely be steaming tablecloths, straightening uniforms, and arranging flowers so that the event space meets her high decorative standards.
My obsession, however, comes with driving attendees into the event. You’d think it would be easy to compel people to come to an event where they will taste several of the best whiskies in the world for free, but sadly, it’s not. What’s this world coming to, really?
You know what’s even crazier? The fact that less than half of those who say they will attend, actually come out to the event. It’s bananas. So we end up planning for less than half of RSVPs attending, while simultaneously planning what we would do if there were some sort of celestial event that causes everyone to show. It’s never happened yet, but I know it’s out there.
So this week, we’re expecting once again that the math is right, that we hit our goals, and the program launches well.
We’re never worried too much though, as we always can go to plan B: Contract this guy – who gets crowds – guaranteed. You must watch.
We hope you have a great summer.
Stay tuned for more!
Rick
It’s events like these that get us excited, because they’ve been proven to work hard for our clients, and the consumers who attend have a great time. Moreover, it reinvigorates the OCD level obsessions of each SoHo team member. Jeff, for example, will be down in Dallas, ensuring that each person at the event implements his “head on a swivel” event management technique, so that the evening will progress flawlessly. Yaz will likely be steaming tablecloths, straightening uniforms, and arranging flowers so that the event space meets her high decorative standards.
My obsession, however, comes with driving attendees into the event. You’d think it would be easy to compel people to come to an event where they will taste several of the best whiskies in the world for free, but sadly, it’s not. What’s this world coming to, really?
You know what’s even crazier? The fact that less than half of those who say they will attend, actually come out to the event. It’s bananas. So we end up planning for less than half of RSVPs attending, while simultaneously planning what we would do if there were some sort of celestial event that causes everyone to show. It’s never happened yet, but I know it’s out there.
So this week, we’re expecting once again that the math is right, that we hit our goals, and the program launches well.
We’re never worried too much though, as we always can go to plan B: Contract this guy – who gets crowds – guaranteed. You must watch.
We hope you have a great summer.
Stay tuned for more!
Rick
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
WELCOME
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the SoHo Experiential Blog, your source for unique insight and news about
We may have some marketing insight to share, or we may just tell you about a hot new bar that we think you should try. Once in a while we’ll share a story about a great event we’ve produced, or a horror story we’ve… ahem… been responsible for. In general, however, we will endeavor to keep you abreast of what is going on in the world of
We are inviting all key stakeholders to follow our blog. So, if you are a
We will strive to provide cutting edge info, hysterical jokes and life-altering insight. That may be aiming pretty high but it’ll be better than a free “Three Wolves Howling at the Moon T-Shirt” (see below).
For your chuckle of the day, please click or copy the link below and read a few of the reviews for the 3 Wolf TEE pictured above.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NZW3IY/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dp
Stay tuned for more
Rick
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