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.

Blink: You're A Chart. He's A Sail.

Malcolm Gladwell in Blink makes a book out of how people create instant impressions of others.

That's great. But what do you do with the information?

My team recently had great success and great fun with the Topsail Personality Profile created by Steve Norcia and Alex Szabo.

In our roles in new product development, we are constantly meeting inventors, licensees, teams of corporate types, sales people -- you know all those who represent a lot of your business transactions.

Our challenge always is how do you quickly decide what someone is like and establish a good relationship. The Topsail Personality Profile let us do that in a blink of an eye.

The personality profile divides people into four types:

• Chart: Low Assertive, High Responsive
• Sail: High Assertive, Low Responsive
• Keel: Low Assertive, Low Responsive
• Signal: High Assertive, High Responsive

These tools let you assess the personalities in order to quickly establish good relationships.

What this means is that

• Sails give you 90 seconds to explain your business results.
• Signals give you 5-10 minutes to establish a personal, social relationship.
• Keels give you 20 minutes to establish a personal, loyal relationship.
• Charts give you 5 minutes to detail your business experience.
  

The indicators are fun even when you apply them to voices on the telephone, e.g. tone of voice, verbal inflections, speech pace and message.

Which is more important after all: good understanding of the facts and great chemistry or good chemistry and a great understanding of the facts.

If you want to play "let's make a deal," I would choose the chemistry first.

Vegas Show Girls Strip Tesco

Religiously, in England, every Sunday after Sunday school, my daughters demanded to go to the High Wycombe Tesco for tea (the village pub being closed, of course, until later). Then, after they had their scones and darjeeling, we filled the trolley with our weekly necessities.

Now, I read that Las Vegas is going to get its Tesco. So Vegas show girls will soon have their own opportunities to stop for crumpets and coffee after a long Saturday eve. And it's not just Vegas. Clearly, Tesco sees the wild American West as their manifest destiny. Stores are planned for Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Edward Kelly, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said that he believes Tesco's U.S. stores will be a hybrid, bridging the gap between traditional grocers, such as Kroger Co. and specialty supermarkets such as Whole Foods Market Inc. and privately held Trader Joe's, while adding the appeal of mass market stores, such as Costco Wholesale Corp., Target Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Well, Mr. Kelly has managed to squeeze every single notable retailing format into a single observation. But surely Tesco cannot fill that gap, whether it is as big as the Grand Canyon or as narrow as Jerusalem's proverbial Eye of the Needle gate.

Tesco confirmed last week that its stores would be just 10,000 square feet, making them much smaller than a traditional 45,000 square-foot grocery store. The stores, which are smaller than supermarkets or mass market stores, are to start opening later this year. Hmmnn, sounds similar to the Tesco Metro format in the UK.

How can you be successful in this kind of format? Focus. Focus on what the customers in your geographic really need and really would love to have. Tesco's house has many mansions, and you can bet that, like any very smart builder, they will tailor their offerings. Take a look at Tesco's web site (www.Tesco.com). They sell everything. Their challenge is ensuring they have the right things in their small format. Here is where CPG manufacturers can provide a value-added benefit to their retailing partner, demonstrating their own savvy.

Last September, I wrote about CPG manufacturers letting drug retailers control the shopping souk, pointing out that meeting consumer demand trumps promotions and the use of merchandising forces to supplement poor retail executions on the part of retailers.

I doubt that Tesco will suffer poor execution. I can't see Tesco lurching around the American West and making, at once, both naive and egotistical mistakes like the larger-than-comic-life English Berrybender family in Larry McMurty's eponymous trilogy. Though Tasmin Berrybender is hotter and smarter and tougher than any Vegas showgirl.

Tesco's challenge to CPG manufacturers is for those manufacturers to be able to recommend the right sku's are in the right geography (both in town and on the shelf) for Tesco. Data on placement, turns and inventory won't be enough. CPG manufacturers need to think about the shopper, the shelf and their leadership. In this case, strategy is a plan for resource allocation decisions that will determine the nature of success on the shelf.

I would recommend that manufacturers take the time to study and to develop shopper insights and cogent strategies for working with Tesco. In that way, a real relationship that can build into a real mutually beneficial partnership can be established with the chain and its future shoppers.

This would also provide a wonderful reason to do store checks in the UK in advance of meeting with Tesco's US management. But not for me. I am heading for Las Vegas. After all, Tesco (at this point) is calling its new U.S. stores the "Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market."

Moses' Management Consultant

The other week I commented on the snake's role in the Garden of Eden in regard to addressing his target audience: women.

This week, I got an email from Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz of the Jewish Theological Seminary, commenting on Moses' management consultant. Rabbi Berkowitz writes that, Moses' father-in-law, watches his son dispensing judgment for the Israelites while they are in the desert after leaving Egypt for Canaan. He sees that Moses has established himself as a true leader amongst the Israelites, and he has become the victim of his own success. As a result of failing to establish clear and workable boundaries for himself, he opens himself to the potential for prophetic “burn-out.”

Now Jethro, the “corporate consultant,” helps Moses to change the dynamic. He quietly observed his son-in-law at work, then he issued his critique in the form of a question: “What is this thing that you are doing to the people?” (Exodus 18:14). Jethro’s question forces Moses to be reflective. Moses recognizes the burden before him, namely that the people are coming to him to seek God, and he is their judge for both large and small decisions. After hearing this response, Jethro wisely proposes a plan for success: Moses will appoint "good" (and I do mean "good," after all this is the Bible) assistants who will judge the common cases while Moses will continue adjudicating the major disputes.

The lessons from this story are to be (1) open to the work of knowledgeable consultants, (2) deliberate and sensitive in our critiques, and (3) like Moses, open to the possibility of change and innovation.

Maybe McKinsey, Booz Allen Hamilton, BCG, et al can adopt Jethro as their patron saint.

Dr. Spock Rides To The SuperBowl on Colts and Bears

There have been a number of good articles about the management styles of Tony Dungy, coach of the Indianapolis Colts, and Lovie Smith, coach of the Chicago Bears.

(Public disclosure: I went to the University of Chicago, so I'm rooting for Da Bears.)

It is noteworthy that both of these coaches are African-American, guaranteeing that this year an African-American football coach will win the SuperBowl for the first time (don't you love these win-win scenarios).

Also noteworthy, as my wife points out, is their management styles. We have two coaches (with Smith an offshoot of Dungy's coaching tree, having worked for Dungy in Tampa Bay) who are not chest-thumping, tough-guy screamers. Both men believe that they can direct, lead and motivate their team by calmly giving directions and treating players with respect.

That's like Nelson standing at the Battle of Trafalgar, taking a cannon shot and still leading the navy to victory.

Football players are smart, operate well within systems, make fast decisions and move to close on a point with speed. They seek to differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage. So, is there really a need to verbally or physically slap these guys upside their heads? Or isn't more effective to get into their heads in the same way that this generation of athletes and executives was raised?

Remember that pediatrician who coached your mom on how to raise you? Dr. Benjamin Spock was the first pediatrician to use psychoanalysis to understand children's needs and family dynamics. To crip from Wikipedia, his ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals.

Mmmnnn. Sounds like Dungy and Smith. Sounds like good managers who have empathy, know what is right, try to understand their employees' needs, direct them with the best strategies for success and provide appropriate goals and measures. And a good situational leader will change their style and approach depending on the readiness of individual employees.

For a generation of professional football coaches and senior managers raised on Dr. Spock, the lessons their parents brought to the crib are the same lessons that can elevate the performance of the team. Now internalized, those lessons remain some of the best ways of improving productivity, creating a prosperous work place and realizing success.

As I have led my teams and worked with them to achieve our goals, I have seen the personal and real value of listening, respect, dialogue, strategy and result. What seems new in these coaches is what we have been instructed and coached on since the nursery. And if we can bring those lessons into the workplace, we will have achieved a true work-life balance.

Which Stage, Coach?

What a brilliant ride Coach is having.

According to Reuters, Coach Inc. reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Tuesday, helped by higher full-priced sales of its handbags during the holiday season, and raised its full-year earnings and sales outlook.

Coach, which sells its signature leather handbags, accessories, shoes and jewelry in department stores and its own stores, said net income for the fiscal second quarter, ended Dec. 30, rose 30.6 percent to $227.5 million, or 61 cents per share, from $174.2 million, or 45 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Analysts, on average, had been expecting 58 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Lew Frankfort, Coach's chairman and chief executive officer, said the latest results were helped by better conversion, meaning that more of its store's visitors bought merchandise. Together with more customer traffic and higher average transaction prices, quarterly sales jumped 29 percent to $836.4 million. Analysts were expecting sales of $800.1 million.

Check out that wonderful statement on better conversation: more store visitors bought merchandise. Why? Let's break down the components because this Coach is riding with a team of great horses:

- Range of price points

- Excellent design

- Line extensions using different, less costly materials combined with great design supporting that range of price points

- Expanded distribution through new retail stores.

Just think of that -- less costly materials, wider range of price points, more items, and still Coach maintained the integrity of its name.

Contrast that with Tiffany's, which has seen a deterioration in its financial situation because it has been pulling back on its cheaper silver jewelry (you know those bracelets and necklaces that every 14-year-old fashionista had to have) to protect its name and to better serve that truly upmarket customer.

Coach has truly steered itself down the right path. Kudos to management.

But this is the same ride, the same reins, that everyone uses. Why did Coach do it better?

Because they weren't afraid when it came to design. They didn't fear pay-for-lower price materials. They smartly managed line extensions, discontinuing skus when they reached their sell-by date. And they made leaps in their innovations.

That's a road that really successful marketers travel down.

The Snake Knew His Target Audience

Out to create a little trouble? Out to sell a product? Want to distribute product information? Decided that sampling is the better way to gain trial and purchase?

Yes, I bet that was what the snake was thinking in the Garden of Eve when he saw Eve coming his way. He got his target market right. He got the first sale. And Mankind lost the Garden of Eden and it has been the world of commerce ever since.

So why is taking marketers so long to wake up and the smell the primroses?

According to Martha Barletta, author of Marketing To Women, women control or influence 80% of all purchases of both consumer and business goods and services. They have joint or sole ownership of 87% of homes and buy 61% of major home-improvement products. They account for 66% of all home computer purchases and 80% of all health care services. They carry 76 million credit cards, and they start 70% of all new businesses.

Now I hate to be a snake in the grass, but I don't think I would waste a lot of my time talking to men if I was trying to figure out how to move major product purchases.

Particularly in healthcare. Not only do women consume a significant amount of health-related goods and services, they are also the gatekeeping purchasers for their male "wards" and for the seniors above them and the children below them.

When I was recently looking at the 50+ market, it hit me like a pan in the face. Forget about men. For anything, spend a lot of time with women, understand their frustrations, their hopes, their needs, their dreams. Isn't that how good relationships grow?

Tailor your products to those desires. And get them talking about it.

If you don't understand the woman consumer first, nothing else matters. It's not sociological. It's not anthropological. It's biblical.

Now That Other Guy Blinked

Some people may remember when Coca-Cola changed its flavor profile to match Pepsi and embarked on the disastrous launch of New Coke. That was when Pepsi took out full page ads that damningly said, The Other Guy Blinked.

Well, I guess it's Pepsi's turn now to be rescued from its glaucoma.

Changing the design of its cans for a new look every three to four weeks?
To attract teens who are always looking for something new?

You've got to be kidding me. What happened to CPG Marketing 101 about the sanctity of packaging design? Did those marketing geniuses at Pepsi get brain freeze at the Dairy Queen?

When I was brand manager of Wisk laundry detergent for Unilever, we agonized over changing the red on the label. Look at the Tide bulls-eye, still there. Same for Dove.

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) move through the minds of teenagers at nano speed. They will forget that Pepsi can faster than their next sip of Mountain Dew.

Brands are supposed to gain value over time (look what J&J paid for 120-year-old Listerine) and their packages are what helps them stand the test of time. Otherwise, how do you really know what's inside?

Those teens will be adults some day. Do you think they will still remember that cool Pepsi can from 20 years ago. The best antidote for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) isn't Aricept. It's branding.

Guess which brand tops the BusinessWeek/Interbrand survey: Coca-Cola.
Guess which brand isn't in the top 20: Pepsi.
Hmmmnnnn.

The issue isn't the package. The issue is the type and quality of product you deliver consistently over time to meet consumer needs. The package is the signpost, the flag, kind of like those flags the samurai warriors follow in the Akira Kurosawa movies.

The risk for Pepsi is that, next month and for the next decades to come, they have those teens mindlessly running all over the place, occasionally bumping into Pepsi, occasionally bumping into other things. That's what teens do anyway -- until they grow up. And then they buy the brands they know and trust. The brands that have always consistently been there.

Okay, Coke, now YOU can say the other guy blinked.

Match Points: A Real Work/Life Balance

Many of colleagues from Pfizer are currently looking for new positions due to J&J's recent acquisition of Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. While I will reserve comments about the sale and the value of acquiring brand assets and getting healthy ROIs through synergistic cost cuts, I do want to put one note out there about the recruiting and searching process.

I was re-reading George Bradt's The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, and I was struck by his opening comments about looking for a job. I want to replay them for my friends who I know are reading this blog.

Bradt writes that there are only three real interview questions:

1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you love the job?
3. Can I stand working for you?

Or, alternatively,

1. Strengths
2. Motivation
3. Fit

That's what it comes down to. My Pfizer friends are looking for new jobs in marketing and sales, but they are also looking at consulting, teaching, social work and nursing. Go for it. As I wrote in my last post, don't enervate. Leap.

For recruiters, their clients deserve the best they can hire. For my friends, they deserve to be the best they can be: using their skills, waking every morning loving what they do and enjoying who they are working with.

In a way, it can be a lot simpler than life or work ever is.

And yes, this may be another way we talk about work/life balance.

Enough for now. The next post is back to Marketing and Management.