Keeping Your Head When Those All Around You Are Losing Theirs

Kudoes to J&J's Rogaine. Sales are reported to be up 25% following the launch of Rogaine mousse foam.

Form does follow function.

Before the launch of the foam, Rogaine was oily, didn't necessarily stay on the top of your head and didn't leave hair looking shiny and free.

So what did J&J do? They reformulated the product into a more consumer friendly version and sales shot up.

The Minoxidil active didn't change. Just the way the product was delivered to the consumer.

In the consumer healthcare operating space, you rarely get novel new actives unless you are switching a compound from Rx to OTC status, such as GSK successfully did with its alli, the weight-loss product formerly known as Xenical (orlistat).

So what you can in consumer healthcare is a lot of development effort put behind forms, flavors and condition-specific indications. That's a lot of effort and most of the time all it does is keep your market share in place and add mopre sku's to your product line-up.

But when you can truly introduce a form that improves your product's consumer-friendly usage you have a real winner.

I only hope pharmaceutical marketers begin to understand more deeply the roles than form can play with product adherence. Using Rogain everyday really is all about compliance and adherence.

Why can't we say the same for statins or blood pressure meds?

Beauty Is the Eye of the Beholder for Allergan and Estee Lauder

How perfect is the deal between Estee Lauder and Allergan to develop an upscale skin-care line in dermatology offices?

All too often pharma companies forget about the role of patient/consumer decision-making in their product development.

And you wonder why 30% of prescriptions go unfilled? That is a dire lack of compliance.

Allergan gets the consumer side of marketing better than many pharma companies. From Botx and to Refresh, they appreciate how to speak with consumers.

Now they have a brilliant tie-up with a premier premium marketer in Estee Lauder.

The new line will carry a variation on the Clinique name and may be priced at a premium over Clinique's retail-store brand as well as Allergan's existing physician-dispensed skin-care products, including Prevage MD, M.D. Forté and Vivité. Some new products will be created to complement and speed recovery from aesthetics procedures, such as laser treatments and microdermabrasion. The products may include medical-grade ingredients that tend to add to the cost and the effectiveness of skin-care products.

This deal also works for Estee Lauder, giving them a new premium channel to see upscale beauty.

And, of course, the physicians win as well with new more patient-friendly lines to sell.

If only more pharma companies thought this way about their products.

Celebrity Skin: Childhood Leukemia Discovery

Cells don’t take a holiday. Your body keeps moving. Cells in the laboratory continue to need care. What do you do when you are born with “pre-leukemic cells?”

“Oh, make me over
I’m all I want to be
A walking study
In demonology.

Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, so glad you could make it now.”

According to a press release from the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), a group from the Medical Research Council Molecular Haematology Unit at Oxford, studying four-year old twin girls in Bromley, UK, has identified a rogue cell that is the root cause of childhood leukemia. Both twins had “pre-leukemic” cells but, to date, only one has developed leukemia.

http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/pressoffice/pressrelease_00598

“Oh, look at my face
My name is might have been
My name is never was
My names forgotten

Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, there’s only us left now.”

It is believed that it takes another genetic mutation, possibly caused by an infection, and is required to create the disease. Leukemia occurs when large numbers of white blood cells take over bone marrow and the body is unable to produce enough normal blood cells. 1% of the population is believed to contain “pre-leukemic” cells and of this population, 1% has the second mutation occur and get cancer.

“When I wake up in my makeup
It’s too early for that dress
Wilted and faded somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here
With your pound of flesh.
No second billing cause you’re a star now
Oh, Cinderella
They aren’t sluts like you
Beautiful garbage, beautiful dresses
Can you stand up or will you just fall down.

You better watch out
What you wish for
It better be worth it
So much to die for.”

One of the twins has now developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but the other twin is healthy. Doctors are continually testing the healthy twin, and they believe that when she reaches adolescence, the rogue cells will disappear.

“Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, there’s only us left now.

When I wake up in my makeup
Have you ever felt so used up as this?
It’s all so sugarless
Hooker/waitress/model/actress
Oh, just go nameless
Honeysuckle, she’s full of poison
She obliterated everything she kissed
Now she’s fading
Somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here
With your pound of flesh.”

Current treatments are too aggressive to eradicate the “pre-leukemic” cells, so screening is not likely, according to doctors. Study leader Professor Tariq Enver has been quoted as saying that now that doctors know about the cell, they hope to some day find a way of targeting the disease.

According to Dr. Phil Ancliff of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (where my son was treated for his eyes and the hospital to which J.M. Barrie donated the royalties from Peter Pan), 90% of children survive leukemia because of intensive chemotherapy. However, that therapy can come at a price. The treated twin has lost sight in one eye.

Such is the kind of research that kinds us all one step closer to cures.

“You want a part of me
Well, I’m not selling cheap
No, I’m not selling cheap.”

Song lyrics from Celebrity Skin, written by Courtney Love of Hole.

Exotic Juices Free Radical Marketing

How about some exotic juices for some exotic pricing?

Snapple has Noni Berry from Polynesia, which is naturally bad-smelling with a nasty taste. But Snapple makes it with other juices to create a better taste.

Snapple does the same thing with Acai. I bought Snapple Acai but when I read the label there was barely any Acai there. Just other juices. Bossa Nova also has an Acai drink, but mixes it with raspberries.

Then there are drinks with yang-mei fruit from China, and Goji berries from Asia. None which taste particularly good.

And this started with pomegranate juice. When you drink POM straight (known as POM Wonderful), it doesn’t taste very wonderful at all. POM Tea tastes better, barely.

I think that what this really tastes like is money.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby tells his friend, Nick, that Daisy’s voice sounds like money. Surely that’s what these manufacturers must be hearing when they put these exotic juices into bottles. And why, do they do so?

Novelty, trendiness, jumping on the health bandwagon.

Why? To provide anti-oxidants that fight the free radicals. I wonder what the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang would think of this. Now those people were free radicals.

Antioxidants are substances that may protect your cells against the effects of free radicals. Free radicals are molecules produced when your body breaks down food, or by environmental exposures like tobacco smoke and radiation. Free radicals can damage cells, and may play a role in heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

Do you get this from these juices? No. As a matter of fact, whatever vitamins or anti-oxidants there are in these juices passes through your body so fast few healthy ingredients ever escape the chutes and ladders of your digestion.

The biggest benefit is hydration from the water in the juice.

It can’t be the taste. And it can’t be the desire to throw good money after poor health.

There is no benefit here that you can’t get from eating nine fruits and vegetables a day.

Talk about SKU proliferation, even at a premium. This isn’t good marketing or good health. All those free radicals really do come at a cost to the marketer and the consumer.

The Zen Koan of Cancer and Lab Testing

How do you study for a test where you are never asked a question?

Sounds like a zen koan.

Koans are a method of training the mind in order to achieve the state of Satori or enlightenment into the nature of reality.

That's great. But what if you are getting a cancer diagnosis?

The Wall Street Journal on January 4 had an article about how thousands of breast-cancer patients may be getting the wrong treatment because of lab test errors.

Sounds scary. Talk about the nature of reality.

The tests are used to determine if women with invasive breast cancer will receive Herceptin, Tykerb, Arimidex, Faslodex or generic tamoxifen.

Not exactly the kind of test you want to fail.

Insurers generally assume that every test is done right, and they pay accordingly. More critically for patients, many of them will also pay for second-opinion breast cancer tests.

But many doctors don’t order them.

In 2007, ~178,000 patients are expected to be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in the US, according to the American cancer Society, and the tests that these patients will require are not straightforward lab procedures. These tests require pathologists to make judgment calls after looking at a tissue through a microscope. That ain’t a simple yes or no.

Oversight in this area is as demanding as one might think. While the FDA must approve every drug, it allows laboratories more freedom in the designing tests. Even when the FDA does approve a test, the lab can still tweak it.

If the pharmaceutical, government and clinical laboratory industries are going to get this right, then a greater emphasis on standardization and review is critical.

How much goes for naught if a pharmaceutical or a biotech spends $1 billion to design and test the drug, and then it doesn’t get into the right person.

Last week, I talked about the power of micro-trends. If more and more people ask questions and request second-opinions and more and more companies focus on improved testing protocols, we can have a very powerful trend that will only be for the better.

This is a move for enlightenment. This is how you study for a test where you are the question and you really want and you really need the right answer.

Microtrends, Orphan Drugs & Evidence-Based Medicines

Here’s a political statement for the new year:

Mark Penn, Hilary Clinton’s campaign strategist, has a book in which he identifies the power of Microtrends to start a political movement or launch a movement. Penn says you only need three million people or one percent of the population. His premise is that by detecting small changes in behavior has a large impact on business, politics and political lives. www.microtrending.com

Okay, now what about orphan diseases. Talk about Microtrends. Orphan diseases affect less than 200,000 people in the US or less than 5 people in a community of 10,000.

Some of the diseases include various types of cancer, TB, cystic fibrosis, Karposi’s sarcoma, Huntington disease, smallpox, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, lupus.

Not a bad list, not a good list. Depends on how you look at it from a public health need, disaster, commercial opportunity or roll the dice for yourself, your loved one or your pharmaceutical company.

Sure soccer moms, according to Penn, can be a potent voting block. Others include extreme commuters (90+ minutes to work), Protestant Latinos, Caffeine Crazies.

Now think about some of the people suffering from these orphan diseases.

The granting of the orphan drug status by the FDA and the EU is to encourage the development of drugs to address these diseases, but, normally, these drug developments would be prohibitively expensive/un-profitable to develop under normal circumstances. www.fda.gov/orphan/oda.htm

The idea behind the US Orphan Drug Act is to encourage companies to invest money in research. Under the act many drugs have been developed, including drugs to treat glioma, multiple myeloma, cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and snake venom. In the US, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization in the US. In contrast, the decade prior to 1983 saw fewer than ten such products come to market.

Leading orphan drugs include Amgen’s Erythropoietin and Novartis’ Gleevec. And these products aren’t cheap.

According to a 2003 article in the British Journal of Cancer, Gleevec® (imatinib mesilate), a tyrosine kinase inhibitior, emerged as the most effective non-transplant treatment available for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

Yet researchers in the United Kingdom reported that the costs per quality adjusted life year (QALY) is approximately $40,000 more than conventional therapy for patients treated in accelerated phase and almost $60,000 more for patients treated in blast crisis.

Gleevec® has been evaluated as salvage therapy for patients in the accelerated or blast phase of CML., and studies determined that initial treatment of CML patients with Gleevec® is superior to treatment with alfa interferon plus chemotherapy.

Yet paying for Gleevec is expensive. Researchers in England compared the economic impact of Gleevec® compared to standard chemotherapy for the treatment of patients in accelerated or blast phase of CML. They used a computer model which took into account 5 years of treatment from the start of treatment. They estimated that a patient in accelerated phase would accrue an additional 2.09 QALYs with Gleevec® compared to conventional therapies, while patients in blast crisis will accrue an additional 0.58 QALY.

They also report that this improvement comes with a price, approximately $40,000 per additional QALY more than conventional treatment for patients in accelerated phase. For patients in blast phase, the cost was almost $60,000 more per additional QALY. These projected costs were highly dependent on the price of Gleevec®, improvements in quality of life, and duration of haematological response.

Now if you REALLY want to think about microtrends. Think about the impact of the really beneficial use of this drug. And then think about its impact on patients, their families, their doctors, their governments, their payors.

What we talk about when we talk about evidence-based medicines is really this.

And no political candidate, let alone pharmaceutical company or payor or legislator is fully undertaking the challenge of addressing these issues. The government recognizes the need. The law is there. But the research and the issues are still being addressed on an ad hoc basis.

The evidence is there and it is continuing to emerge and evolve. The basis for a sound policy and a sound strategy still needs to be developed.

Why Are Baby Boomers Hiding Their Smile?

I wonder if we got it all wrong and just simply forgot what is important about taking care of teeth.

I was recently looking at the data for global growth trends in oral care, and I was struck by how flat the market is trending, in low single digits.

The companies themselves aren't doing badly. P&G's share is up signficantly because it bought Gillette and Oral-B. J&J jumped with its acquisition of Listerine and Rembrandt. Over the years, the Gaba acquisition has been good for Colgate.

But what about the consumers? Emerging markets like China and Brazil and Mexico are up as more and more people find toothpaste they can use everyday becoming increasingly affordable.

But I wonder if those companies have missed a beat with those marvelous baby boomers in the more developed markets who are discovering that their mouths are changing with the rest of their bodies.

In America, for example, Baby Boomers, when younger, were taught to brush after every meal or at least twice day and to see their dentist at least twice a year. Good stuff. And fluoride rinses help too. My children don't have any cavities.

But I am not a child nor are those millions of Baby Boomers in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Our mouths are not the same as when we were kids. Aging mouths generate lots of different issues, more gum disease, tooth loss, dry mouth, oral cancer, etc.

Yet I bet the vast majority of baby boomers still follow the same oral care regimen they followed as teenagers (without the Binaca).

If the senior managers in those major oral care players were wondering how they could gin up their businesses in the developing markets, they might not have to look any further than their own mirror. Or, at least, have a series of really good conversations with their consumers and their dentists. As for me, I jst bought more dental floss.

Helping Hands for the Public Benefit of OTCs

Well, an FDA advisory panel this week rejected Merck's third application bid for a Rx-to-OTC switch of Mevacor (lovastatin) because, in Merck's studies on how consumers would respond the proposed labeling, a significant group of people, for whom taking Mevacor was a wrong decision, decided to take the drug.

Okay, I won't make a flip remark about how people frequently make wrong decisions about taking drugs. But I will note that we, in the US, are missing a major public health benefit, by not giving consumers/patients more access to these life-lengthening medicines.

Almost everywhere outside of our 50 united states, consumers/patients have the opportunity to seek advice from their pharmacists about some of their ills and those pharmacists have the ability to dispense medicines to them that were once prescription-only.

Are US pharmacists any less trained than those in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia or Japan? I don't think so.

We already have a de facto third class of medicines in the US. That's what we have done by placing Nicotine-Replacement Therapy, Pseudoephedrine and Plan-B behind the counter. And we have done this without congressional legislation and with FDA approval.

If the pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies, public health advocates and the appropriate associations really cared for consumers and for the ability to provide life-lengthening medicines to the general populace surely a solution can be developed.

The precedents have already been established in the US. I have seen research that clearly demonstrates that, by lowering the existing barriers to access, consumers would welcome the opportunity to engage with their physicians and their pharmacists and to be more compliant and adherent with their medicines if they had easier ways to purchase their medicines.

Think about it: lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, fewer severe migraines. Longer, more productive lives. If we can truly create the will, we can easily define and implement the way.

The Morning After is when you can buy your medicine yourself

Barr Pharmaceuticals recently announced that sales of the Plan B “morning-after” pill nearly doubled last year, exceeding its expectations, vs. its previous Rx-only annual sales.

Morality issues aside, Plan B's sales growth indicates the power of the patient (read: consumer) to seek out clinically proven drugs when they are given freer access to them

Look at nicotine replacement therapy. Doubled after the patches went OTC from Rx. Look at the recent brilliant success that GSK is having with alli (read: Orlistat/Xenical).

By reducing barriers to access, patients and consumers are able to take control of their own health needs.

Weight management. Unwanted pregnancy. Smoking cessation.

The public health benefits for these “lifestyle” issues are tremendous.

Pharmaceutical companies spend millions upon millions of dollars addressing physician writing of their medicines. But look what happens when you remove the Rx/Physician barrier. Greater use. Greater compliance. Better results.

More and more pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies need to understand the barriers and the drivers to compliance. The results can be better sales, better compliance, better health.

Viagra - Brains over Blood

Many people say that men think with their (blank) and not their brain when it comes to women.

Well, now a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Viagra indicates that the drug may do both.

Viagra, known generically as sildenafil, raised levels of the hormone oxytocin in rats. This hormone is involved in nursing and childbirth, but also in orgasm and feelings of sexual pleasure.

Viagra inhibits the phosphodiesterase type 5 enzyme which breaks down other compounds. This action increases blood flow in the muscles and the posterior pituitary. This, in turn, boosts oxytocin, at least in the rats.

All those late-night comedian and water cooler jokes about Viagra tend to focus on a man’s needs or desire. However, when you get down to it and you are not a kid anymore, it is really about mutual satisfaction.

If pharmaceutical companies can do more to capture the mental aspect of why and how patients should take their medicines, they will trigger the real needs and desires of compliance. Unfortunately, most pharma companies focus their marketing development on physicians and use those 30 second direct-to-consumers ads to encourage presentation – but not to ensure compliance.

They miss the real links between motivation and desire and realizing the real and long-term benefits of medicine for their patients. In the case of Viagra, the link between brain and blood may really be real. If a pharma can make that link, for other “lifestyle” drugs that address hypertension, diabetes and lipid management, that will be a break-through.

Pharma Bolt-Ons

How should we think about bolt-on mergers for Big Pharma?

Recent deals have included Schering-Plough's pending buyout of Akzo Nobel's Organon BioSciences unit for $14.4 billion, AstraZeneca's pending acquisition of MedImmune for $15.6 billion, and Mylan Laboratories' pending takeover of Merck KGaA's generics business for $6.7 billion.

It is really pretty simple. It is all about filling portfolio gaps and adding new products and capabilities without all the hassles associated with major acquisitions.

Less dilutive, less complex, more complimentary.

This approach is sound from both an asset management and asset acquisition point of view.

This approach isn't new. Warner-Lambert acquired Agouron in 1999 to get its eye business and library of compounds, a nice simple complimentary acquisition.

Then Pfizer, to preserve its access to Lipitor, bought Warner-Lambert and then, to preserve its access to Celebrex, Pharmacia. Ouch, indigestion that even Nexium couldn't fix. Getting Lipitor has buoyed Pfizer for years, but Celebrex ran into problems and millions of dollars in shed expenses and thousands of lost jobs, hasn't been able to salve the Pfizer stock prize or offset the rising tide of patent expirations.

Making more strategic bolt-on acquisitions over recent years could have added more products to maintain and to ultimately grow the company's product portfolio. Witness what Pfizer is now doing in vaccines.

Pfizer Vaccines Research is a new area of research committed to the belief that biotherapeutics, including vaccines, will grow to form 20 percent of the Pfizer portfolio, leading to the launch of one biotherapeutic product a year, every year, by 2016.

Here is a strategically sound bolt-on combination of small and large molecules.

Look for more of these kind of acquisitions in the future across the industry. The pressures of the marketplace demand it.

Facebook jumps into the internet marketing souk

Look at the brilliance of build it they will come.

The internet field of dreams represents the power of appealing to and talking with and selling to millions of people -- in a space, on a platform through a way that simply did not exist several years ago.

What do I mean? From Reuters, I saw that Facebook.com at f8 just announced this past week plans to allow it to become a software operating system for all sorts of Internet media and said it has signed up 65 partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., to build Web applications within Facebook.

The company is transforming itself from a Web site into a "platform" that will allow developers to build services that work both inside Facebook's site and on their own independent sites.

"Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we're going to end that," Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old CEO, told a gathering of software developers. Half of Facebook users, or 12 million people daily check the site to see what their friends are saying and doing.

Facebook can become a central clearinghouse for software developers, borrowing a few pages from the decades-old strategy playbooks of Microsoft or IBM, while retaining the flexibility of the new generation of Web-delivered services.

The Palo Alto, California-based company has created a new Web programming language of its own called Facebook Markup, a variant of the basic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding that underlies all Web pages, with a few special features. Independent developers can sell ads or incorporate tools for conducting online transactions and keep all the resulting revenue.

The marketing souk just got bigger. The ability to capture proprietary sales got deeper.

Also, clothing sales just surpassed electronic sales on the web.

When we talk about the power of word of mouth, Facebook just kicked this approach into hyper-drive for its partners and for people who talk to people they like and trust. That's real warp speed.

Occam's Razor Cuts Through Marketing

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness").

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Now apply that to marketing complex products.

Roger Dooley reviews the research in this area on the Marketing and Strategy Innovation blog, and applies it to the purchase HDTV sets. Think about the complexity involved here. Evolving technologies, evolving features, a multitude of feature variables -- how can anyone begin to construct an internal conjoint analysis about what to buy.

As for me, I use CNET. Not necessarily the best source, but it helps. The same for my Ipod. I use ilounge.

The internet is a great resource for getting advice and direction. Mossberg does this for readers of the Wall Street Journal and Wildstrom does it at Business Week.

But this need goes begging everyday for marketers. The challenge is to distill down what consumers really want out of your product and get it into your advertising brief.

The Elmer's Glue of Gumption

Dan Heath, the Director of Duke Corporation Education, lists out:

6 Principles of Sticky Ideas

• Simplicity: Isolate your core message and convey it succinctly.
• Unexpectedness: Surprise and intrigue with leaps of thought.
• Concreteness: Make it real and recognizable.
• Credibility: Use details that symbolize and support your core idea.
• Emotions: Evoke feelings about what matters.
• Stories: Connect the dots with proverb-like arcs.

How many times have you made a presentation and delivered an absolutely brilliant strategic observation -- but no one knows what to do with it?

How many times have you read a company's mission statement only to recognize the gobbledy-gook of corporate-speak slathered over a good idea that is meant to inspire people?

In many companies, I have been struck by what I saw on their walls. I saw offers to taste products in development, literature about the company's focus on diversity in the work force, pictures of global leaders meant to inspire and slogans meant to lead.

I wondered about how sincere these messages came across. They were placed in all good intention. But when you are having reductions in head count, watching products stuck in the middle of a market share battle that rivaled the World War One Battle of the Somme for casualties and futility and fielding more calls on the Employee Assistance Social Work Program than the switchboard can handle, you have to wonder about the best way of escaping the entropy of the maelstrom.

Great thoughts come easy.
Great expressions are tougher.
Implementation can be tougher still.

Taking those thoughts and making them sticky can go a look way to nailing the task to your wall of accomplishment.

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.

Apple TV Buys Google, Announces New Channel

Apple TV doesn't try to do everything. It can't receive or record cable or satellite TV, so it isn't meant as a replacement for your cable or satellite box, or for a digital video recorder like a TiVo. It can't play DVDs, so it doesn't replace the DVD player. Its sole function is to bring to the TV digital content stored on your computer or drawn from the Internet. Like a DVD player, it uses its own separate input on your TV set, and you have to change inputs using your TV remote to use it.

Just like the Ipod, Apple TV is all about simple, elegant -- err, I mean, cool (as cool is the new elegant) technology that delivers media content ("software for your life") for your personal entertainment.

Now what could better fill that delivery system than YouTube? Hours and hours of personal and professional videos streamed to your TV by the Apple TV.

Much as Sony sought movie studios, we will probably see Apple setting up a more sophisticated Itunes video capability. However, what Apple will realize is that, when it comes to video, the studios aren't as poor and desperate as the record industry was when to comes to selling their content.

In a now brilliant move, to be announced in five years, Steve Jobs will buy Google, allowing him to use I-Thou Tube (renamed in honor of Martin Buber) as a streaming device for video content for paid and unpaid media.

In addition, as an extension to the personal MacBooks, which will be the size of a paperback and fit into your messenger bag or cargo pants pocket, Apple will rebrand Google as IGoogle and launch a new personal search service that will allow you to go back and rebrand your life, from your birth certificate through those embarrassing movies your parents took of you in the elementary school chorus until the present day -- framing your personal biography for posterity and allowing at the same time to share your experiences with millions of other people, while accessing the world's stored information for your personal use.

And St. Augustine asks how many angels could dance on a pin? Now it's how many lives can dance on an HDMI connection.

GPS Shopping: Seek and Ye Shall Find

Luke Chapter 11: Verse 9 - And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

If Mammon represents a significant deified aspect of the internet, then Nearby Now and GPShopper have the tools for you. These companies are developing mobile Internet applications that allow shoppers to use their cellphones or PDAs to search the inventory and prices at local malls, reducing the expeditions to Sawgrass and Palisades to focused forays.

Just think no more Lewis & Clark treks through the Mall of America, using strollers for portage and swatting at the gnats of hawkers who hold empty promises of bargains.

Now, after you've seen it online or heard about it from that neighbor, you can journey to the cathedrals of commerce and know that your effort will not be wasted, your shoe leather shall not be worn and neither shall you want anymore.

According to the New York Times, NearbyNow tested its application at the Eastridge mall in San Jose. After shoppers signed on, they received a message listing sales in progress and asking users to type in the brand or product they were seeking. Jeans showed 90 stores. Levi 501's showed 14.

With these tools, when K-Mart wants to advertise a blue light special, you can have a thousand shoppers stampeding from all over the mall to the store.

Unfortunately, retailers do not have a good enough handle on their inventories to be always able to reflect what they have in stock. So, yes, there will be some disappointments.

But if you are looking to drive traffic, these tools can be a godsend.

In many categories, retail stores are more and more becoming showrooms. Consumers search for it online, then they go into the store to touch it and try it, and then they go home to buy it online. What a great expense those fancy retail environments are quickly becoming.

However, these technologies can revitalize stores, helping to move merchandise, motivate browsers and attract shoppers who ARE ALREADY IN THE MARKET.

You won't need truffles for these applications. What retailers do need, though, is the desire and the know-how to buy the technology coming down the pike. It is not enough to make the store fun to shop. You need to also help make people want to buy. If I were a marketer at retail chain, I would want to drag my IT person into the chair next to me and start partnering on the future of shopping. That's a faith they both need to believe in.

Pop-Up Stores: This Year's Nano Promotion

Whatever happened to test markets? Once upon a time, you could test your new product in a whole self-contained city. Based on consumer reactions in Dallas and Houston, at Lever Brothers, we knew that Surf laundry detergent was going to be hit with its revolutionary odor-inhibiting perfume. P&G even fired its Texas sales team because our test market blew them away.

Following the need for more privacy, we soon began using BehaviorScan test markets in even smaller cities (Indianapolis) where you could partition different ad messages to different consumers, know the different dollar rings at different chains and tailor your promotions.

But city-wide test markets became too expensive. Confidentiality and Speed became ever more important to both you and your competitors – who can knock you off faster than a regional rollout from Kansas City to St. Louis. P&G thought they had a huge winner with soft chew cookies (and they did) but the competition copied them quickly and knocked them off at the knees before they crossed the Mississippi. In this instant message age, you can forget about keeping anything a secret.

Then everyone went black box with Nielsen (and still do). No one knew what you were testing or thinking (including most consumers) and millions of dollars were spent on complex algorithms that were as clear as the Eurythmics singing Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This).

Now, in this time of nano-testing, we have “pop-up stores.” What could be more brilliant: flash testing new products in flash stores. Faster than a jump drive. Both Product and Retail Format are here and gone in the blink of an eye.

When Malcolm Gladwell and everyone who ever took an instant dislike to someone they just met or a bit of food they just tasted formulated their own arbitration of taste, we get the ultimate marketing boost.

In Chicago, Kraft is testing its DiGiorno Ultimate pizza in a pop-up story on Michigan Avenue, which was, in its immediate previous incarnation, a pop-up store for Lexus. Now that's a Universal Serial Bus everyone can jump on. Or, in the case of Kraft, Universal Cereal Bus.

In the town of deep-pan pizza, the Augie March chutzpah of Kraft to go head-to-head with Pizza Uno in the Loop is great. What a wonderful in-your-face exercise in test-marketing the pizza and gaining notable publicity – all at a relatively modest cost.

I just hope that the Kraft urban ethnographers are in the store, extra napkins in hand for the patrons, recording the reactions for future innovations and modifications for line extensions (e.g. freeze-dried pineapple).

One of the first pop-up stores was Target’s boat off Chelsea Piers in 2002. If Target was using a destroyer, I bet Wal-Mart was planning a battleship for plowing its way into New York. Now the Behemoth of Bentonville is set for the New York B&T (Bridge and Tunnel) crowd. New York City will give Target the space they wouldn’t grant Wal-Mart. Hubert Humphrey Minnesota values vs. Arkansas Land-Grant imperialism – okay, you choose.

Meanwhile, Target launched its Isaac Mizrahi women's clothing collection with a pop-up store at Rockefeller Center in New York. If imitation is the sincerest form of mid-market taste, we saw J.C. Penney do it at Rockefeller Center when it introduced its Chris Madden home collection in 2004. Meanwhile Fila introduced a new sportswear line on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 2005, and Nike popped up in New York's SoHo neighborhood when it launched a special edition basketball shoe named after LeBron James.

With more and more companies exploring nano-stores, think of the promotional possibilities inside super-centers and club stores. Costco and Wal-Mart could carve out a whole free-standing section of real estate and rent it out to major CPG manufacturers for big-time nano/pop-up promotions.

Come visit the Kraft Store in Wal-Mart and assemble your own meal and buy the week’s groceries. Try Kroger’s Unilever Laundromat where you can do your wash with Wisk and fill your cleaning bucket. Chill at Costco in the Sony Concept Store where you can buy LCDs, music, stereos and DVDs.

The question is whether or not this transient marketing approach builds brands. It’s great for excitement and publicity but that’s strictly short-term.

Like all promotions, pop-up stores are good for a spike. However, they cannot be as good as building imagery and value over time.

I would still want to be sure that I had the right position, the right communication of benefits and an excellent integrated marketing plan that covered the basics of brand building. And that the pop-up stores was only one facet of my marketing efforts.

That way I could cover myself in this nano-test, knowing I was not only securing my present but also planning for my future. Oh, and pass the napkin because the pizza wasn’t half-bad.