In mid-August teens here in sunny CA were dragged back to school lamenting that the tradition of returning after September’s Labor Day holiday is now a faint memory from kindergarten. To add insult to longer-school-year-shorter-summer injury my son, a college student, enrolled in the local junior college and came home outraged that his books cost more than his tuition by almost double. On top of it he was forced to buy new books because the professor insisted on their doing homework online, requiring a CD, ultimately to make it easier for the teacher to grade online. The used book version didn’t come with the now requisite CD ROM, which of course needed to be purchased from the college bookstore in order to be sold-back as used. I think he referred to it as a racket which isn’t great PR for an industry in trouble. He also thought it was ludicrous to be forced online not only for a professor’s convenience but for an advanced algebra course where it is actually harder to do one’s work. Typing algebraic formulas doesn’t exactly come naturally to the typing rhythms these kids were taught. They are, after all, text-based. He saw absolutely no benefit to any of this and frankly I can’t say I did either. A shame. Oh and I did I mention that he said the school was teeming with students, some standing in the back of classrooms trying to get in. A flood of students from state universities, along with folks who are unemployed trying to re-educate themselves arrived into the junior college system at the time California has had a budget melt-down and cut classes and capacity. A perfect storm. Our younger son, soon applying to university, was told this week that 40,000 applicants won’t get into the California state university system fall of 2010. They’re preparing us for 5 and 6 year educations which we’re told to expect. I guess this means we can also expect textbooks that cost more than classes for even more years to come. Perish the thought.

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…And by that we don’t mean social media or user generated content. We’re talking name-brand world-class global 2000 companies. Just this week I was watching a PGA golf tourney on TV and in comes a commercial from Nationwide. They are talking about and featuring their new iPhone app and how cool it is for helping during a car accident. It had features for taking a picture at the scene of an accident, a place to store the exact location of the crash, and mechanisms to exchange information with the driver, notify insurance companies and so on. I said to Greg, amazing. Every time a major company is doing a commercial like this, Apples’ being advertised. This is brand-building (and lead gen) at its best because to run the app you’ve got to have the phone and that drives traffic to the ever-busy Apple Store.  AP had lift like this when its iPhone app was advertised with a half-dozen other apps in full-page spreads in the Wall Street Journal and other leading newspapers.  And JD Power & Associates managed use of its name brilliantly when every car, credit card and leading brand being measured got to use JD’s name and paid handsomely for the privilege to boot. They were the ‘Intel inside’ of those adds. Few information companies have this ability but it’s an important lesson from Apple and brilliant when it happens. And to think we thought it was just an ad about insurance.

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When I wrote about Disney I wrote about how invoking the Disney name created a brand image that translated to their marketing of trips and the instant feeling one could know and trust how it would be to travel with Adventures by Disney. They used their trusted brand perception to market a different offering and promise experiences similar to what we’ve come to know and trust in their movies, theme parks and hotels. They also used their name and logo consistently. What I love about a recent experience with MINI Cooper was how they were using all their marketing muscle to reinforce their brand image and brand perception to make sure it was consistent. At last year’s San Francisco Auto Show, we went by their booth. They had about 10 different cars, colors and styles on the floor and people were crawling in and out of them having a great time. The cars were open, accessible, and fun. The colors were fun. The way the different cars were appointed was fun.

Their brochures were fun. And guess what. They’re brochures were ‘mini.’ They were multi-fold that you could open and close like an accordion and no bigger than about 4 inches x 4 inches. The MINI Cooper had a mini brochure! And its difference made it fun. Notice the operative word? Fun. Notice the consistency. Their brochure wasn’t standard size. That would have been incongruent with their brand image. No one would have noticed, maybe, but the fact that the brochure was small made sure you knew MINI was mini and mini is fun. You know the car is safe, you know it drives. It’s a car for heavens sake so they spent no time on that and more time on their brand image and promise, making sure their brand image (what it stood for) was being consistently reinforced and making sure that the experience of all things ‘MINI’ are congruent and fun. There’s that word again.

Memo to information providers and publishers. Make your product, your company, your team, and the way you interact with your marketplace stand for something. Conjure up images that are positive. Make the experiences real. Be relentless in being consistent and dare to be ‘real’ and dare I say, fun!

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More brouhaha on the web this week with the marketing team from West blundering by alienating one of its core markets in an attempt to target a new market. A marketing moment gone wrong, for sure. In her Library Journal piece Lies My Vendor Told Me, Barbara Fister notes that West is not the only publisher to fall into this trap.” Outsell’s David Curle sees the goof as “evidence of increasing tension between products sold directly to lawyers versus those sold through libraries.” The marketer in me says this is one of a myriad of examples of the industry not “getting” channel management, and targeting target markets where they live and doing it by not having to alienate one market in order to garner another.

Rule of thumb 1 -Don’t upset a core market when trying to target a new  one. It’s not smart.

Rule of thumb 2 – Make sure products are properly differentiated.

Rule of thumb 3 – Librarians have certain wants and needs with their use of legal information. Market to them about those applications and the benefits to them.

Rule of thumb 4 – If librarians are not just using legal info but also provisioning it for direct use by users, talk about those products benefits.

Rule of thumb 5 – Market to users about the products designed for them and  focus on their wants and needs. Dissing librarians to accomplish this goal is bad form and counter-productive.  (See Rule of Thumb 1.)

And golden rule of thumb 6 – Treat customers like you’d want to be treated.

There’s gold in golden rules.

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