Back in the late 1990's I worked on a very fun account the Polaris Recreational Vehicles (snowmobies, ATV's, motorcycles and personal watercrafts) account at Martin Williams. I had the opportunity to help launch a new brand positioning platform for the brand and it was a lot of fun and a great experience.

We proposed a brand video to help ground all Polaris employees in our new brand position and brand theme line "The Way Out". In the opening scenes of the video our Executive Creative Director Lyle W. wrote an incredible piece of copy that pretty much summed up the experience of riding a Polaris vehicle.

It went something like this: "The feeling I get when I go out on a ride is like the feeling you have when you wake up on a Saturday morning the first day of your vacation - a sense of freedom and excitement and the feeling of getting away from it all."

The line of copy from a very powerful video has always stuck with me and tomorrow morning I will have that feeling again when I wake up as I'm off on vacation.

Vacations are very important tools to help us re-charge our batteries whether we go and experience new things or go back to familiar places. The trip that our family is about to embark upon is one of a bunch of new experiences. I'll post more when we are back - but right now I'm thinking of the great feeling I'll have when I wake up tomorrow and I'll remember to thank Lyle for penning such a wonderful thought.

It's a long race

Last night I had the chance to visit Target Field again and saw one of the two World Series trophy that the Minnesota Twins have.

It's always a cool thing to see a World Championship trophy and to think about how hard the people associated with the team worked to win it. It also reminded me that any success professional is usually a long race. Wins are usually not secured in a short period of time, but rather it is a long distance race.

To win over the long haul you need have a goal and be prepared to stay on your strategic course. You may get some early results that indicate you are right on target. And then you may hit some bumps on the road and you veer slightly off course. Pretty much like a typical MLB season for most teams. You win some, you lose some and then you have some close games and if you win a majority of them - you end up having a successful season.

So while you are managing a brand for your client you need to have this stick-to-it-tiveness also. You will have some great sales days and you might have some days that do not perform up to your goals. But you take away learning from that and keep executing to the strategies that you laid as the foundation for your plan.

When you are managing your brand - just make sure you keep your eyes on the prize. It's a long way to the finish line and you need to stick with your plan - make some slight tweaks to keep you on task. It's a long race - just be prepared to stay focused on your goals and good things tend to happen.

Great Customer Service by Apple

When I get great customer service it strikes a chord with me. Apple has continually delivered terrific customer service across many touch points that I've had with them.



My current example is that I needed to set up my voice mail account on my new iPhone4 and to do that I needed to recall the password that I set up once back almost 3 years ago. Well I didn't remember so I started to look for ways to talk to a live customer service person for Apple.



Found the number and in under 90 seconds was talking live to a very pleasant sales rep. Everything worked out great and he got my new voice message box set up.



So when I got the email survey today to fill out I was more than happy to provide some very positive feedback. It was at the conclusion of the survey that once again Apple over delivered. A very simple "thank you" page in many different languages. This is so smart and so Apple.



Thanks again Apple for another great customer service experience.

Old Spice = Wildfire

Wow, this campaign is on fire. Everywhere you turn people are talking about the recent launch of the newest Old Spice campaign. Yesterday I saw some of the videos in my Facebook stream. And then last night I saw the brilliant TV spot during the MLB All-Star Game which reminded me to look at their Facebook page and Twitter pages this morning.

If W & K is producing these videos in real time and using Twitter posts and other posts to make the spots they have broken some new ground in the new marketing world.

This is the campaign of the future and it's fun to see it evolve over time - or the last 48 hours or so. Put a comment up on Twitter and then have the brand respond back to you with not just a comment but a video answering your question. Would love to have been in the room as this concept took hold. How cool must it have been to present and sell this to P & G?

Hats off to W & K for the idea and P & G for the foresight to say move forward.

Although Old Spice has been smartly re-positioning the brand over the past couple of years I really think this campaign will provide the rocket fuel to change every one's perception of this brand that has been around for a long time. I grew up with the Old Spice "whistle" campaign and frankly it was a yawner.

This new campaign totally takes the brand to much more modern and hip place and is a brand that now appeals to the young male audience. Good idea to grab them young and create a lifetime customer.

It's campaigns and work like this that make this an exciting business.

So who's next? What brand is going to do something so spectacular that the next wildfire is lit.

Have you heard of Oxytocin?

In a recent Fast Company issue there was an article on the subject of "oxytocin". OK so I'm curious and wondered what the heck is oxytocin? It is a hormone produced daily by our brains. Dr. Paul Zak a professor of Claremont Graduate University is the expert on this subject and he popularized "neuroeconomics" and emerging field that combines economics with biology, neuroscience and psychology.

He believes that Oxytocin is the key (not to be confused with the pain-killer oxycontin). Known as the hormone responsible for the bond between moms and their babies, oxytocin is now recognized as impactful for marketers to connect with their customers.

During his various studies over the past decade Dr. Zak has measured chemical reactions and his results are very interesting. In fact a key finding was that social networking may increase a person's oxytocin levels, and this means heightened feelings of trust, emphaty and generosity. Think about how brands can tap into this opportunity via social media messaging. They will be able to make their Facebook "likers" even stronger "likers" - maybe we could even call them "lovers".

So the simple message if you believe in what Dr. Zak is studying is that brands that clearly connect with us as consumers and raise our oxytocin levels will do well in the future. And those that can't won't.

It's time to start raising the oxytocin levels of your customers. It can't hurt can it?

What consumers watch

Nielsen just presented some interesting stats about the weekly time spent by age demographic in the U.S. for the first quarter of 2010. While these numbers should not be a shock to me - it is always a little eye-opening when you see how much time people are using technology each week.

-Watching Traditional TV = 35 hours and 34 minutes
-Watching Timeshifted TV = 2 hours and 9 minutes
-Using the Internet - 3 hours and 52 minutes
-Watching Video on Internet = 20 minutes
-Mobile subscribers watching Video on a mobile phone = 4 minutes

Despite all the notices that TV viewing is dying - viewers watched two more hours of TV per month in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the first quarter of 2009. How about you do you think you're watching more TV than last year.

My TV viewing is way under half of the average U.S. viewer. They have their televisions on for more than 5 hours each and every day. I'm sure part of the increase can be due to the rapid growth of more content and better quality with HDTV's. Nielsen reports that 52.7% of US homes now have HDTVs and receive HDTV signals.

I'll make this prediction right now. I bet that TV viewing in the first quarter of 2011 will increase again. Yes that is a bold prediction. But the trends continue to point to American viewers spending more time on the couch than doing other things.

Still going strong after 25 years

I recently read in the advertising trade press that a brand that I worked on many years ago and was part of the agency team that helped introduced it is getting some strong marketing support again after a few years with limited support.

Bull's-Eye Barbecue Sauce is a brand that I first started working on back in 1985 when I was at FCB in Chicago working on the Kraft business. I also worked on regular Kraft and Kraft Thick 'n Spicy BBQ Sauce brands. It was a fun category and a really smart group of people were involved in managing the various products.

I've been a supporter of Bull's-Eye for the past 25 years and when I buy the category I always buy Bull's-Eye. Yes I'm a loyal supporter of the brands that I've worked on.

Strategically I loved the positioning of the product of "big bold flavor" which allowed us to flank one of the new brands at that time K.C. Masterpiece. The product delivery was outstanding and the package design was terrific and it still is. At that time there was no mention of Kraft as the manufacturer as we wanted the brand to be seen as an upstart boutique brand to fight off the local competitors that were nicking into Kraft's overall share of market.

The product was a hit from Day One and continues to be on the shelf now 25 years later. It's kind of cool to sit back and reminisce about the people that worked on the brand and some of the tactics that we used to launch the brand. We did things like send the product to "stars" of the markets that we entered to get some buzz going. And we ran full-page newspaper ads with the stores that the product was located in to drive distribution.

I guess in looking back - there were smart people involved + smart marketing ideas = a long term product success. So thanks to Joe, Karen, Len, Mike from Kraft and to Terri, Linda, Gary, Marian, Dan and many others at FCB. That launch was a lot of fun.

Congrats Bull's-Eye and good luck to the teams that will carry it another 25 years.

First week with the new iPhone4

Last Wednesday I got an email from Apple and I had to pick up my new iPhone4 by the end of the day on Thursday. Well needless to say I was excited about this but I had to first of all work during the day and then in the early evening attend our kid's city qualifying track meet.

I made it out to the Mall of America Apple store by 9AM - they close at 9:30. So I went through the process pretty quickly and was out the door by 9:20. The new iPhone4 looked great and I was excited to try it out.

Spent an hour getting it set-up at home that night and getting all my info transferred from my old iPhone (the original version).

Here are my thoughts after spending a week with the new iPhone4.

-I love the screen and clarity of it.

-The design is sleek

-It's fast - so much faster than my old iPhone

-Battery charge seems to be much stronger also

-Love the video feature although I haven't edited anything yet

-Love having a flash on the camera - some night pictures turned out pretty good

-Reversible camera (front or back view) is cool technology

-32g of space - will take me a long time to fill this one up versus my 8g which couldn't hold everything that I wanted it to.

So my perspective after the first week - is that the iPhone4 rocks. there are plenty of things that I haven't done with it yet but I'm looking forward to reviewing the 200+ page owners manual that Apple has up on it's website. A 200+ page manual for a phone. That pretty much sums up what this phone can do. And I'm excited to test the boundaries of it.

Apple once again hits a home run with this product.

How do you read the newspaper?

The headline from an article today from the Center for Media Research caught my attention. It read "123 million Americans reading newspapers on the web".

According to a new comScore release more than 123 million Americans visited newspaper sites in May, representing 57% of the total U.S. Internet audience. These are some seriously big numbers.

So newspapers aren't dead yet - it's just that consumers are reading the papers on a different platform - online. Tell the New York Times with 32 million visitors a month that their newspaper is dead. So while circulation is down significantly for newspapers - Americans are consuming as much news as they ever have.

Online newspapers are the future for the newspaper industry. Their ability to capture revenues through online advertising will allow them to continue and potentially even thrive again as they re-tool their business model.

How do you consume the newspaper - if you do? For me I still love to get the paper in the morning and browse through the headlines. I might check online during the day at their website or though the daily email they send me on the story headlines of the day. And at night I go through it thoroughly to dig a little deeper into the key stories of the day.

I just love the feel of the newspaper and will always enjoy that early morning time. No matter where I'm at - I need to get my daily newspaper fix. I'm sure over time as the newspaper evolves I may be reading it more and more online. But until then count me in as an old fashioned newspaper reader.

How about you - how do you read the newspaper?

Saint Paul Saints Still Doing it Right

My wife called late on Wednesday afternoon and said I just got four free tickets to the Saint Paul Saints game tonight - do you want to go?

Not hard to answer that question - it's baseball, it's summer and it's beautiful weather - you can count me in. I had to pick up my son and then meet my wife and daughter at the game.

Given that this is the first season where the Minnesota Twins are playing outdoors I thought what will it be like at the Saints game? The crowd? The extra stuff? What will they do different?

After parking in a lot nearby Midway Stadium my son and I saunter up to the main parking lot and see the smoke from all the tailgating - check that hasn't changed. We get closer to the stadium there is a band playing outside - apparently it is Walser Wednesday. They are also serving free hot dogs and bottled water so we make a stop to get some free stuff before we enter the gates of Midway. Nice touch by the Saints of course.

As we enter the ticket entrance area at the stadium we look up and look who is our ticket taker - Mike Veeck the owner of the Saint Paul Saints. He warmly greets us and asks how we are doing and most importantly utters the words - "Thanks for coming out tonight".

That is customer service. The owner telling us thanks for coming out tonight. Right then we knew that the Saint Paul Saints are still doing it right. It was a well played game (Saints win 3-2) with some decent baseball. Some really nice catches by the Saints left fielder and a long home run by the Saints first baseman. And of course all the great in between innings promotions.

Our customer experience at the Saint Paul Saints was terrific last night. Great baseball, great promotions, great weather, great seats (FREE) and a greeting from the owner. So yes in our opinion the Saint Paul Saints are still doing it right. And we hope for many years to come.