Genie In A Bottle

Aladdin, when he rubbed his magic lamp, had a genie appear who granted his wishes.

Ever try that with the bottle that your prescription medicine comes in?

You're looking for magic and what you get is an amber translucent plastic tube given to you by the pharmacist behind the counter at Walgreen's.

That ain't magic.

Then the pill comes out, maybe it's shaped kind of funny, has an odd color, a company name and number engraved on it. My dog tags look better than this.

And it is supposed to cure me? And my doctor thinks this pill is a good recommendation? And it costs me $25 a dose? And this drug represents $1 billion for the pharmaceutical company in sales?

And does this really motivate to comply and stay on my meds?

I wonder if this is really good marketing practice for the Rx value chain.

In contrast, I love my Ipod. I got excited when I bought it. I loved unwrapping it and taking it out of the package. I enjoyed what it did for me. And I thought the premium was worth it.

Why can't we do the same for the delivery of prescription medicines. Target tried with their redesigned dispensing bottle, but the focus on that bottle was communication of information.

I want to delight in my health as much as I delight in my music.

If we could develop a true partnership in medicine delivery from a marketing perspective, I bet we could have more delighted, compliant patients who recognize the value of their medicines. But when we put those medicines in that plain bottle, the message we convey is that we don't care that much about you and whether you take this pill or not. Good luck, it's your life.

Here is where marketing can contribute to responsibility and to encouragement of compliance. That can be the genie and the genius of marketing.

Brain Freeze

I was listening to an e-briefing today jointly sponsored by the Strategic Decisions Group and Stanford University on tapping creativity for profit, and I was struck by how frozen companies can get when it comes to innovation.

All too often it comes down to the right brain/left brain disconnect where people and businesses have a hard time getting creativity and business discipline to come together.

When this happens executional frost-bitten results in entropy. In Information Theory, Entropy is the measure of the rate of transfer of information in [that] message. If you don't believe, just read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

What the briefing pointed out is that Creativity is all about
- customer experience
- "wow" factors
- excitement
- but no evaluation by "controllers."

while Value Discipline is about
- share-holder value
- analysis
- number crunching
- but creativity is only a "nice-to-have" after financial targets are met.

Yet there are examples of success: A.G. Lafley at P&G, Jim McNerney at 3M and Steve Jobs at Apple. All three drove share-holder value by combining design and creativity with value/business discipline.

The proposed model from the e-briefing is flip back and forth between applied creativity and value significance, recognizing that sometimes you think one way and sometimes you think another.

Yeah, well, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the mark of a genius was the ability to hold two thoughts in one head at the same time. However, no one ever called Fitzgerald a genius. A great writer, yes. But no smarty pants.

The way to accomplish this is to combine creativity and value significance into one compelling mission statement. When I was put in charge of Listerine Pocketpaks, I told the team that our goal was to be product of the year in Business Week. Everyone, marketers and scientists and financial analysts, all got it. We achieved that goal.

Creating a compelling mission is the way to avoid brain freeze in an organization.

The CPG Flat Stanley Project

If you ever asked where in the world was Waldo, the answer should have been that he was hanging out with Flat Stanley, understanding the life he led and how to participate in his adventures instead of just trying to get that scroll from Wizard Whitebeard.

From Wikipedia, The Flat Stanley Project, created by Canadian school teacher Dale Hubert to facilitate student learning and writing, provides an opportunity for students to make connections with students of other member schools who've signed up with the project. Students begin by reading the book, Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown, a story of a boy flattened by a falling bulletin board who emerges fine but flat and then embarks on a series of adventures.

Students make paper "Flat Stanleys" (or pictures of the Stanley Lambchop character) and keep a journal, documenting the places and activities in which Flat Stanley is involved. The Flat Stanley and the journal are mailed to others who are asked to treat the figure as a visiting guest add to his journal, and return them both to the other student.

Students find it fun to plot Flat Stanley's travels on maps and share the contents of the journal. Often, a Flat Stanley returns with a photo or postcard from his visit. Some teachers may prefer to use email. In 2005, 6,000 classrooms in 47 countries participated in the project.

The Flat Stanley project exemplifies a great two-dimensional viral way of communicating with and educating young people globally.

So how can marketers take advantage of this concept? Well, it is a given that global brands have and represent great tangible and intangible assets.

But think for a moment:
Do we always recognize how our brands fit into people's lives?
Do we always recognize how to make the best connection with consumers, particularly in emerging markets?
Do we recognize the best way to educate potential consumers?

Everybody in Marketing and their mother (who gets the call center question routed to Mumbai) is living Thomas Friedman's version of The World is Flat, but they may not be extending that living connection to their brands.

In a NY Times article on India becoming a more complex market (April 3, 2007), Michael Cannon-Brookes of IBM comments that India is "one of the world's two biggest pools of high value skills, which we want to leverage both to help clients in the domestic marketplace and to help clients globally."

Which domestic marketplace: India or the US? If you are selling chocolate or bottled water or detergent, can they be the same?

In fact, thinking about global education can make them the same.

In that same article, Anand Giridharadas writes that Indian IT firm Infosys Technologies spends $65 of every $1,000 in revenue training its employees; in contrast, IBM spends $6.56.

I would be targeting those Infosys employees. They are going to be smarter and have more money to buy my Nespresso machine and my Dasani water.

The key, though, is that Infosys recognizes the value of education. That is a critical component of any Flat Stanley consumer marketing campaign. Yes, you have to get the pricing, the packaging and the positioning right.

But you also have to show how the product fits into people's lives.

In this same NY Times issue, Richard Lenny of the Hershey Company announced that Hershey is forming a joint venture in India with Godrej Beverages and Foods to manufacture and sell, confections, snacks and beverages.

Now we really know that the world can be as flat as a Hershey bar and still just as tasty, and that knowledge is what's key to our market and brand development.