Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Today's Stem Cell Decision: A Victory for those who Value Saving Lives

As the parent of a child with type 1 diabetes, the daughter of a man who died of complications of type 2 diabetes, and the granddaughter of a woman who died of Alzheimer's disease, I was thrilled to see President Obama follow through on his promise to lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.

The restrictions on this research placed by the previous administration were meant to pacify religious special interests. Today's action was meant to help save lives.

Here's what happened over the last 8 years of the ban:

• Other countries continued to progress their own stem cell research, making this yet another area where US efforts were left behind.
• California voters passed their own initiative to fund stem cell research, creating the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).
• Millions of people continued to suffer and die from diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, spinal cord injuries, etc.--diseases that might be helped by the outcome of stem cell research. There are over 24 million people in the US suffering from diabetes alone and tens of millions more at risk for the disease.

Will this technology cure these horrible diseases? No one knows for sure. But we do know that there is incredible potential that cannot be found elsewhere. As a society, we have a responsibility to use the tools and technologies we have available to help improve living conditions for those amongst us who suffer from these diseases or injuries. We have a responsibility to allow scientific research to move forward unfettered. We have a responsibility to save lives.

The Talmud says, "He who saves one life is as if he has saved an entire world."  As of today, we're back on track to save millions of worlds.

What We Want and What We Need

"You can't always get what you want. But if you try, you just might get what you need."

Rolling Stones

I can't help but think of this song today, Martin Luther King Day 2009. Here we are in the midst of the worst economic crises in almost a hundred years. The banking industry is in turmoil, jobless rates are rising, foreclosures are at an all-time high, the retail industry is at an all-time low.

Every time you turn around, you hear of another financial industry takeover/bailout or more retailers going out of business: Mervyns, Linens and Things, Circuit City, to name just a few. Detroit is in shambles; even Silicon Valley standbys like Google are cutting back.

For a long time we lived in a world where whatever we wanted or even thought we might possibly want, we could get. And we could get it in multiple shapes, colors and sizes from a variety of sources. Once we had that, there was something new we could buy to add on or complement or upgrade what we already had. On the housing front, we were encouraged to buy bigger and better houses, to improve the ones we had, or to enter the home ownership world even if we didn't really have the credit worthiness to do so.

Fast forward to today. When push comes to shove, we've learned that people don't need $4 cups of coffee from Starbucks several times a day--or even once a day. They don't need more home entertainment or computer equipment, or new clothes, or furniture, or a lot of other things.

Instead, we've started to focus on what we really need: A financial system that's trustworthy. An economy that creates jobs. Basic ways to handle transportation, housing, food, etc. Friends, family and connections. A government that works with us not against us.

How fitting that our new president-elect called for a national day of service today. How fitting that tomorrow we inaugurate a man as president who brings a new approach and a new outlook and a new focus on what's needed to move forward in this new world.

For a long time, we've had what we wanted. Now it's time to get what we really need.

Yes You Can...Use Lessons From the Obama Campaign Marketing in Business

In the December 1st issue of Business Week, Jon Fine says Your Brand is Not a Candidate:(Marketing Lessons from Obama's Campaign) "The Obama campaign's marketing was remarkable. But you can't use it to sell yogurt."

His point is that the selling of a political candidate, particularly a presidential one, is very different than buying an everyday product or service. He says the lessons are limited to "something that makes people cry when they see it giving an acceptance speech."

Granted, the Obama campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for many reasons. But the strategies and tactics the campaign team used so effectively were not.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Obama team understood the importance of building a brand that people crossed party lines, demographics, race, and ethnicity. They knew better than to focus on features, but instead targeted clear benefits. They integrated traditional and new media, effectively used personalization and built an outstanding grass roots, bottoms-up groundswell of support. They kept one clear, focused message throughout the campaign and focused on the benefits to the consumer--the voter. (How many times did we hear Obama say, "It's not about me--it's about you."?)

So which of these strategies are not relevant to businesses and individuals as they market products and services?

They're all relevant.

The bottom line, to quote Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss, is that logic makes people think, emotion makes them act. When you get behind the wheel of a brand new high-end sports car or buy an attractive new outfit or treat yourself to a wonderful dinner at a great restaurant, or buy an iPhone, what's driving that purchase is emotion, not logic. It's not about the need for transportation or clothing or sustenance or communication--it's about the emotional experience and fulfillment you get from purchasing that particular product or service.

Look at the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls (including mine) who lined up to see the new movie Twilight this past weekend. If that's not an emotional reaction, what is? There's certainly no logical reason to flock to a fairly mediocre movie about vegetarian vampires.

In a time of recession and economic turbulence, it is even more important for companies and organizations to understand the emotional factors that motivate customers to buy their products or services. Before you decide to bite the bullet and compete on price, understand the implications of what that means. The number one retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, owns that position fair and square. They tightly control their supply chain to eliminate excess cost and because of their size, they have the clout to negotiate more effectively than any of their competitors. Is that what you want to compete with?

Even more importantly, no matter what market position you choose to differentiate yourself, look at what happens when you don't take the time to build an effective brand with clear differentiation and a solid brand promise you can deliver. For a timely example, let's look at the Detroit 3 auto manufacturers, who were in Washington this past week looking for a bailout. Their problems are complex: high overhead, bloated pension and health care costs for retirees, etc.

But even if all of those issues could be fixed, through bankruptcy or a bailout, they'd still be faced with a critical problem. With few exceptions, they haven't built strong, solid brands that consumers feel passionately about.We can't force people to buy Chevys or Fords, any more than we can force people to not want to buy BMWs or Toyotas.

Apple and Nike and Coke, among others, have figured it out.The problem is that many other American companies haven't. That doesn't mean we can't put lessons from the Obama campaign to work in business today. It means that it's a crying shame if we don't.

Brand Obama: How Barack Obama Really Won the Presidency

There's been much discussion over the last two weeks of what exactly Barack Obama's campaign team did right to help him win the presidency of the United States.

In their November 17th Business Week column "Three Reasons Obama Won,"  Jack and Suzy Welch focus on lessons business leaders can take from McCain's loss and Obama's win. They make three points which they say business leaders can learn from:

• Start with a clear, consistent vision.
• Execute well.
• Have friends in high places.

While I agree that all three of these are true, they've missed something critical: in a very short time, Obama built a strong, powerful personal brand--basically from scratch.

I teach Branding Strategies at San Francisco State. I ask my students to tell us their favorite brands. We get the usual favorites: Apple, Nike, Target, Trader Joes, Coke, etc. In October, however, several students said their favorite brand was Barack Obama.

How interesting. For the last 18 months, I've had my students evaluate each of the candidates brands, tell me what they stand for and how well they are doing in delivering on their brand promise. This was a fascinating exercise in the early primary season when we had a varied cast of characters from Hillary Clinton to Rudi Guiliani, Mike Hucklebee to Mitt Romney, not to mention McCain and Obama.

In the early days, the candidates were often defined by their demographics (female, African-American, Mormon, ex-POW, divorced Catholic, etc.). But as time went on, it became clear that Barack Obama had done a tremendous job building a strong brand, based on change, hope, inclusion and making a difference for America. He did this using a combination of grass roots efforts, traditional media, and an outstanding use of new media, from websites and blogs to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, from personalized donation emails to brightly colored logowear that was hot and hard to find.

As opposed to McCain, Obama did this by focusing on the future, on the potential for good, and on the positive--not by knocking the competition, shouting and screaming, or defending the current situation.  In doing so, he created a brand that people were proud to be involved with--a brand that transcended race, ethnicity, gender or age. He created the kind of brand all companies wish they had.

And that, as much as the three reasons the Welchs articulated, is the reason Obama won.

The Branding of Our Candidates

As I watched the highlights of the Democratic National Convention, I can't help but focus on the brand called Barack Obama. This morning, after hearing about McCain's choice for vice president, I'm wondering about the brand called McCain as well.

Yes, Obama has a brand, McCain has a brand, and so do all of the other assorted candidates along the way. You and I have personal brands, too, though we likely put much less emphasis on understanding and promoting them.

In my Branding Strategies class at San Francisco State, we do an exercise where students are randomly divided up into groups and asked to evaluate the candidates brands: what are their brand promises, what do they stand for, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how well are they doing on delivering on those promises.

This was a much more interesting exercise when we had a full slate of potential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and others. This year, for the first time, we had a full range of choices when it came to gender, ethnicity, race, religion and marital status.

What's interesting is that over the last year or so, the class has consistently said that Obama stands for change and hope and doing things differently, and they've rated him fairly high on fulfilling his brand promise. They had a hard time, OTOH, getting their hands around what McCain's brand promise was, besides more of the same.

Brands are always evolving and adding features and benefits to supplement their current offerings. This week, Obama chose Joe Biden, who brings experience and foreign policy expertise to the Obama brand. McCain chose Sarah Palin, who brings youth, inexperience and a non-Washington perspective.

What do these choices mean for the 2 candidates' brands? It will be interesting to watch how the American public answers this question, but at this point, it looks like Obama has tried to supplement a known weakness in his brand (relative inexperience) by adding Biden. McCain has  addressed the weakness of age, by choosing someone very young and with virtually no experience. He's addressed diversity by including a woman, but I'm not quite sure yet what the McCain/Palin brand stands for?

By choosing Palin, it appears that McCain has done two things he may regret: He may have actually strengthened Obama's brand by making Barack look much more experienced than Palin, and he may have alienated many of Hillary's supporters who were on the fence, by choosing a running mate for her youth and gender and asking voters to accept her as an equal substitute for Hillary, who like her or not, brings a wealth of experience, maturity and seasoning to the table compared to Palin.

The jury's still out on this folks, but stay tuned. Things are just starting to get VERY interesting.

Driven to Distraction

In preparation for California's new hands-free cell phone law on July 1st, I finally broke down and bought a bluetooth wireless device.

Well, I actually bought my second bluetooth wireless device. I had bought one a couple of years ago, found it to be terribly annoying and not very useful and quite promptly lost it. This time I bought one of the more advanced models, the Jawbone, and I find it to be terribly annoying and not very useful. The good news is I haven't lost it yet.

For the last week or so, I've been walking around with this thing in my ear trying to get used to it. What I find is that I am significantly more distracted using this thing than I ever was either holding the phone in my hand or using the speakerphone. First I had to try two different earpieces and three different earbuds till I got a set that seems to sort of fit my ear somewhat. Then I have managed to either disconnect people who call, call people I don't mean to,  or try to talk out of the phone when the call goes to the headset or vice versa. I can't figure out how to make the volume go up and down in real time, and any advanced features are way beyond me.

This has got to be the law of unintended consequences to the max. Here's the story. I do believe there are some people who are very distracted when they talk on the cell phone, and many of these people talk and drive at the same time. I've seen them and so have you. However, I don't for a second believe that these folks will be any less distracted because they have this thing in their ear.

I also believe that these are the same people who long before cell phones were distracted by everything from the car radio to their kids in the back seat, reading the paper, looking at a map or GPS, etc. In other words, some people are just plain distracted. These are also the folks who probably can't multitask on even simple tasks. That's ok. They can work serially one task at a time.

The rest of us who can multitask fairly well and are even wired to perform better when we're multitasking are now stuck with a regulation that makes our lives more complicated and IMO less safe.

The CHP is supposedly sitting with baited breath just waiting to start citing people who are not hands-free next Tuesday. I just hope they will also take the time to stop all those people who are distracted by other things beyond cell phones, as well as those who are incapacitated and really shouldn't be driving in the first place.  But it might be too distracting to ask them to focus on more than one thing at a time.

The Real Problem w/Senator Craig

It's been hard to miss the ongoing saga of Idaho senator Larry Craig whose recent arrest and guilty plea for lewd behavior in an airport restroom has been a top news story for the last week or so. After being  nearly ex-communicated from the Republican party, last weekend Craig announced his resignation from the US Senate.

Or did he? Today's headline is that Craig may "reconsider" his resignation, depending on the outcome of his "reconsideration" of his guilty plea.

Personally, I don't care whether Craig is straight, gay, bisexual or something in between--that's his business. What bothers me most about this is that the man seems to not have a backbone: he can't make a decision and stick with it.

First he pleads guilty to the bathroom charge. Then after this is publicized, he reconsiders his decision. Then he decides to resign his Senate seat. But a few days later, he reconsiders his decision.

We're not talking about choosing paint for your living room, or which car you want to drive. The decisions Craig has made in the last several months are serious ones. One does not plead guilty to a crime without considering the implications thereof. He had the right to an attorney and appears to have not availed himself of one before submitting his pleas. Before resigning from an elected position, one should consider that it's unlikely they can simply "unresign" later. If the man can't understand the implications and repercussions of making a decision and living with it, then in my book, he should also not be making decisions about topics that impact all of us such as the war in Iraq, government funding or other key issues that may come before Congress.

I don't understand why we as a society, and Republicans in particular, are so obsessed by people's individual sex lives. However, as a long-time member of that party and an elected official representing that party in national office, Craig should have understood how behavior like this would impact his standing with his colleagues and his constituents. He is responsible for his own actions and the consequences thereof.  If he was innocent, he should have not pleaded guilty. If he didn't believe this should impact his ability to serve his constituents, he should not have resigned.

If he had a backbone, he would make a decision and stand by it.

Voting Process Made Easy...for real!

I have been a permanent absentee voter in California for years and years. That way I don't have to worry about where I am on election day, getting to the polls by a certain time, etc. The ballot comes in the mail, I fill it out and return it and everything is set.

Until this year. Somehow I managed to lose my absentee ballot. Actually, I think I may have thrown it out. Here I was less than a week from the election, past the deadline to mail my ballot and ensure it would be received, and dreading the thought of having to go vote in person.

Luckily I live in San Mateo County, where the county government has made these things straightforward and simple. I called the voter registration number (which I found via Google), and told the person on the other end I'd lost my ballot. She said I had 2 choices: go to my normal voting place (which I've never been to and don't know where it is) on election day, or come down to the voter registration headquarters in Redwood City anytime between now and Tuesday and vote there.

I was amazed at how simple and automated the process was at County Center in Redwood City. My first thought walking in to the assessor's office/voter registration office was how clean and neat and organized it was. Real estate related files are all neatly catalogued on cassettes, the mounds of paper that were likely present in this kind of operation previously have all disappeared, and all the service centers in the office are neatly marked. The woman @ the absentee voting station was pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful. She looked up my information on her computer, had me sign an affidavit that I had lost my ballot, then offered me the choice of using a paper ballot or one of the computerized systems they had available.
When I said I'd never used their system before, she said, well it's quite simple and I can walk you through the whole process without a problem. She then proceeded to demonstrate how the system worked (which really IS quite simple and intuitive). It took me about 5 minutes to go through the ballot, highlighting each candidate or initiative to vote for, then I was asked three times to confirm my choices (and given the opportunity to change them), before the ballot was officially cast. I got a receipt with a confirmation number corresponding to my ballot and I was done.  Total time from when I walked in the door until I walked out: less than 7 minutes.

It was actually really simple, effective and efficient. When is the last time you said those words in conjunction with local government? In fact, the most difficult part of the whole process was finding parking in downtown Redwood City.  Well, some things never change...