Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Just a Moment for Marketing: STRATEGIES vs TACTICS: The What vs The How

Take just a minute to watch my video about identifying the What before you work on the How.

 

Eighteen Years Later: We Walk for Life

Anonymous
$250.00

Avery Horzewski
$100.00

Florence Finer
$100.00

Francine
$18.00

Heidy Braverman
$108.00

Ilana Beth Popky Finer
$180.00

Ilana Popky-Feiner
$50.00

Irwin Markowitz
$100.00

John Weathington
$18.00

Lucie Newcomb
$25.00

Ms. LInda Popky
$180.00

Nat and Mimi Ezray

Paul Hsieh
$54.00

Eighteen years ago today, on September 22, 1993, my daughter Ilana was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, just 5 days short of her 2nd birthday.

To say it was a frightening time is an understatement. She had lost 20% of her body weight and could barely stand up. The doctors handed me a syringe, an orange and a vial of saline and told us to practice giving injections because we were going to need to manage this ourselves--no doctors or nurses would come home with us to test her blood sugar or administer food or insulin as needed. We were on our own in a whole new uncharted world.

A few injections of insulin brought back the weight she'd lost,  the smile to her face and the energy of a normal toddler. But it couldn't bring back the islet cells in her pancreas that her body had mistakenly destroyed or the way of life we'd gotten used to.

Eighteen years ago this week we learned how to do finger pricks and test urine samples. Today, the amount of blood and time needed to do a blood glucose test has been reduced dramatically and we no longer need to test urine.

Eighteen years ago this week we learned how to follow a strict set of dietary guidelines, including what exactly Ilana could eat and when. Today, with an insulin infusion pump, she's able to deliver exactly the insulin she needs to cover exactly the food she wants, when she wants it.

Eighteen years ago this week we were told that type 1 diabetics fell into two groups: those who would wind up with life threatening complications, like blindness, kidney disease, loss of limbs or cardiovascular disease, and those who would not. We were told that we wouldn't know for 18 years which group Ilana would be in, and there was nothing we could do about it. Today, with improved technology and medical advances, the rate of complications for type 1 diabetics has been reduced to the low single digits, and with good control, even these are decades away.

Eighteen years ago we didn't know if Ilana would be healthy enough to go to college. Today, not only is she a junior at the University of Colorado at Boulder, but she is right now spending a semester abroad in Wellington, New Zealand--something we never could have imagined eighteen years ago.

 

Ilana snowboarding in New Zealand, August 2011

A lot has changed about diabetes in the last 18 years, but some things haven't. There is still no cure, nor do we have the artificial pancreas we were promised was just "a few years away." Millions of people live with this disease--some are type 1 like Ilana; many more are type 2, like my late father, who died of diabetic complications.

The Hebrew word for eighteen is Chai, or life. Eighteen years ago we walked into Stanford Hospital to save Ilana's life. Today we walk in Santa Clara with JDRF to save the lives of the millions of people who have this disease now, or will be diagnosed with it in the future.

In honor of Ilana and all the other brave kids, parents and caregivers who never, ever get a break from living with diabetes, I will be participating in the upcoming JDRF Walk on October 9 in Santa Clara, CA.

My goal is to raise at least $1800 for diabetes research--100 years of life.

Eighteen years ago we faced a diagnosis. Our dream is that eighteen years from now, we'll be celebrating how much time has passed since the disease has been cured.

Join us.

Return to Sender: Netflix's Misguided New Pricing and Branding Strategy

In my Brand Management classes, one of my favorite activities is looking at some of the really absurd mis-steps big, well-known brands have taken in the past.

We all know about Coke and New Coke, but there was also Colgate's ill-fated entry into frozen dinners (can't you just taste the mint in that chicken dish? Mmmh!), LifeSavers brand soda (bet dentists love that one), and my absolute favorite, Bic branded cologne for men (that must have been on everyone's holiday shopping list).

This week we have a new candidate for what I call the Whatever Were They Thinking Award: Netflix.

Recently, Netflix decided they wanted to be in the streaming business, not the DVD-shipping business, so they dramatically raised their rates on movies by mail.

Then this week we saw an email apology from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings apologizing for the confusion and telling us he hadn't shared all the good news: The original DVD part of the business is being spun off into Qwikster, while the streaming business retains the Netflix name.

Now, those of us who still are backward enough to like DVDs (shame on us!) will need to go to a new website, start a new movie queue and build a whole new set of recommendations over again, since our old information won't transfer.

Hastings tries to explain the company's logic in wanting to be in the streaming video business, not the DVD business. However, he's totally missing the point.

Netflix is in the business of delivering  entertainment to consumers --easily and seamlessly. Period.

Whether that entertainment is via DVD, streaming video, on my Nintendo, my iPad, or some other newfangled way yet to be invented is totally irrelevant.

Netflix had developed strong brand equity in the entertainment delivery business, so much so that they put Blockbuster out of business. Now not only are they introducing a new brand, but they've dramatically raised prices, they're making their customers do a significant amount of additional work just to get the same service they had before at a higher price, and, by the way, there will be fewer offerings available  moving forward because several large content providers are cutting ties with them.

To Netflix, all I can say is Whatever were you thinking?

The lesson for the rest of us is do NOT force your customer to deal with you in a specific prescribed way. Give them multiple choices to work with you. Make it easy not hard.

Wall Street has already reacted negatively to this, as have many consumers who are cancelling their service.

This strategy should be stamped Undeliverable and returned in a red envelope back to Netflix. Or is that now Qwikster?

The House Hunting Chronicles Part 1: Setting Your Sites on Real Estate

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the very rich are different from you and me. Today, we might say the same about the real estate market in Silicon Valley.

In spite of an extended recession, double digit unemployment numbers, an ongoing foreclosure crisis, and general panic about the economy, Silicon Valley is booming. Whether this is another bubble or not is to be determined, but the combination of recent and expected IPOs from companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Zynga, as well as continued strong growth from companies like Google, have driven up real estate prices here and limited availability. The rental market, BTW, is not immune, with rental prices up over 20% year over year in the Valley.

In the midst of this froth, I've decided to jump into the fray by downsizing from my large, comfortable house in Woodside to something much smaller.

In true Silicon Valley style, not only does my house have its own webpage,  but it also has its own Facebook page. With more than 25 Likes, it will now have a directly named URL on Facebook (Hmm. What happens if my house gets more Likes than I do? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)

Now that my house is staged and on the market, it's time for me to start looking for something new. Sounds simple but it's not.

The web has revolutionized house hunting. You've probably heard about Zillow, but there are a dozen or more websites doing similar things. There's a site that lists all the open houses happening on a given weekend, and another that takes the pictures you put up on the website and turns them into a minivideo compelte with narration. There are sites that will match your parameters in terms of desired features (number of bedrooms, bathrooms, pool, view, etc.) and desired locations and send you a daily update with all the properties that match, as they become available. There are sites that will calculate mortgage and taxes for any given property, provide history of prior ownership, and even tell you who your neighbors are. There are even sites that will aggregate all of the other real estate sites.

This is not to mention the photographs and virtual tours prepared for each house, and the realtor sites that list not just their firm's listings but all of the available properties within a given area.

The good news is you can save a lot of time and shoe leather by doing the prep work online and narrowing the focus down to the properties that look good.

The bad news is that, to paraphrase, on the Internet, noone will know your house is a dog. The only way to see if a house REALLY looks anything like those incredible pictures that look so enticing online is to go see the house in person. In my next post, I'll share with you some of the adventures I experienced on my first set of house hunting tours. Wonder if there's a real estate site for that?

 

HP Shoots the Messenger: Does reassigning Chief Communications Officer communicate the wrong message?

HP's recent announcement that it wants to exit the PC business has generated a lot of flack: The stock took a big dip and customers are publicly backing off from buying more PCs from what is currently the world's largest manufacturer of said computers.

A few days ago it was reported that HP's Chief Communications Officer, most likely the person who crafted the messages and managed this announcement, has been put on "special assignment." At about the same time, a new PR and ad campaign broke repositioning the PC business announcement to try and generate a more positive spin.

Bill Wohl, who worked closely with new CEO Leo Apotheker at SAP, was brought over by Apotheker into the newly created Chief Communications Officer role just a few months ago, so the timing of this new move is a bit curious.

I don't know Wohl at all and I'm not familiar with his work, but I have a hard time believing that even a Chief Comms Officer who is tightly tied to the CEO can be held solely responsible for this kind of mis-communication.

Whether or not the strategic decision to exit the PC business is a correct one, it had to have been made by a team of senior executives who should have been aware of the impact of this kind of announcement (at least we certainly hope so). A communications officer can craft messaging and try to put out a positive spin, but this is not the kind of announcement that should have been made without serious thought to the consequences, from both a sales as well as an investor viewpoint (at least we hope not!).

Moving communications back under the marketing function may make sense for the organization, but HP's Marketing organization has gone through significant change over the last several years. It seems like the venerable Silicon Valley bluechip company is faltering in ways that Marketing can't necessarily coverup. Beating up on marketing and communications is like scolding the deck hands on the Titanic for not arranging the deck chairs more attractively.

On a related point, at the same time it made its PC announcement, HP also said it was cancelling  their new tablet line, and announced a bargain basement price to move existing inventory. Given how much time and resource and expectation had been put into this line, this was fairly shocking. Rumor has it there have been major quality problems with HP tablets, resulting in major product returns, but I don't have direct experience with the product.

At $99, the tablets started flying off the shelves like hotcakes, so much so that HP announced this week that to meet demand they would make another run of the product they just summarily killed. Huh? So is the product line resuscitated, is it the technical equivalent of a zombie, or are we not sure how much capability  the "patient" will recover when this is all over.

Here's the kicker: Estimates are it costs HP over $300 to make each tablet, yet they're ordering *more* units to be sold at $99 each. That's a loss of $200+ on each unit, but I guess they'll make it up on volume?

The best marketing team in the world can't put a good spin on this kind of confusing strategic move. And here's the worst part: If you have a habit of shooting the messengers, then it doesn't take long for people with something important to say to put their heads down and duck for cover.