Jurassic Marketing

I couldn’t help but smile recently by a headline in my email reading “Digital Pushes PR and Marketing Closer.”

Actually, tactical activities such as PR as well as other forms of promotion such as sales and advertising were tucked under the heading of marketing nearly 60 years ago.

But someone a lot younger than I am obviously still hasn’t received the memo.

Social historians, such as Dr. James Stoddard, a marketing professor at Appalachian State University where I will guest lecture on strategy next week for one of his colleagues, gives us insight into how marketing evolved over the last 150 years.

The period from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s, is known as the “production era.”   Then the Great Depression ushered in the “sales era” where promotion became a tool to unload products.

That all changed after WWII, but many marketers, including far too many in my former profession of community destination marketing, are still stuck in the 1930s.

These DMO’s are made obvious by their obsession and that of the communities they represent with mega-facilities, mega events and then paying subsides in order to get visitors to come.

This creates a never-ending cycle guaranteed to hollow out any sense of place in these communities, robbing them of their innate appeal.

Marketing had turned the corner from these techniques by 1960 when Dr. Theodore Levitt published Marketing Myopia in the Harvard Business Review, which was expanded into a book during the first decade of my now concluded career.

That means my former peers have had more than three decades to shift gears.

So why are so many marketers, though much younger, still stuck so far back in the past including those hoping to be enabled by a handful of legislators in North Carolina eager to facilitate long since obsolete forms of “desecration marketing” along roadsides?

Shortly after I landed my final marketing gig for Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Levitt famously wrote in another article entitled Advertising: The Poetry of Becoming:

“People don't take vacations to get away from it all but to escape from modern commercialism.  And the chief culprit is advertising.”

We know now from longitudinal studies that this was five years after the effectiveness of traditional advertising tipped into its long slow decline to where it now has a negative return on investment.

Urban Institute researcher and friend of mine, Ed McMahon put it another way in an article published last month in Virginia Town & City entitled Responsible Tourism:

“To understand mass market tourism, think about mega hotels, theme parks, chain stores and the new generation of enormous (4,000 to 5,000 passenger) cruise ships.

Mass market tourism is about quantity.  Mass market tourism is also about environments that are artificial, homogenized, generic and formulaic.

To understand responsible tourism, think about unspoiled scenery, locally-owned businesses, historic small towns and walkable urban neighborhoods.”

Gallup not only conducts research into workforce engagement but also “customer engagement,” which is a primary objective of marketing.

Across a variety of industries, Gallup finds a “powerful link between customer engagement and key business outcomes.”  Fully engaged customers represent a 23% premium over the average.

On the other hand, actively disengaged customers who work against you represent a 13% discount.

The three areas Gallup finds as key to customer engagement are:

• Company [organization or community] always delivers on what they promise.
• I feel proud to be a customer.
• Company [organization or community] is the perfect one for people like me.

In his new white paper entitled Contextual Marketing and the New Marketing Contract, analyst Brian Solis teases out that “empathy makes engagement personal” and when paired, it is “context that makes things relevant,” regardless of the marketing technology used.

Beginning decades before the Internet, marketing became not just a way to follow customer orientation. according to Stoddard, but the means to guide an organization’s direction.

For a community destination marketing organization that isn’t stuck in the distant past, this means that marketing is a tool not just for promotion but the means to safeguard a community’s distinctiveness.

The road to marketing empathy for a community begins with being comfortable in your own skin and seeking not the masses but only those for whom you strike a chord.

It is this overarching strategy that has enabled Durham, a relative latecomer, to leap frog much more established destinations in North Carolina, most of which are trapped in the pre-WWII sales driven world.

It is a world that exchanges distinctiveness of place and empathy for pure mass and homogenization, trading authenticity for mainstream until there will be no reason to go there or no one left in that dwindling market segment.

Sales obsession is what leads some communities to sacrifice soul for envy, build structures that draw fewer than those they replace, recruit events that displace more tourism than they bring.

In other words, a river of no return.

In the words of Solis, various technologies such as email, social media, digital advertising or creative content are a means to engagement but they can “miss the potency of context and empathy.”

The folks at StrongView define context in a marketing sense as “the unique combination of the consumer’s disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

It is part of the continuing evolution from the product focused marketing of the early 1900s to the customer-centric marketing that emerged after WWII.

In a community marketing sense, it begins by not trying to be something you community isn’t but seeking appeal instead to paraphrase McMahon in urban forests, historical context, locally-owned businesses and organic districts, history and people-scaled settings.

In the words of McMahon, it is focusing economic development on what you have rather than what you don’t have even if in tourism it means “ lower volume, lower impact, but higher yield.”

In other words, context.

The Future of Wearables is More than Devices

In its February trends snapshot, Blueshift Research found that 40% of Americans made no change over the last six months when it came to living habits such as diet, exercise, sleep etc., up six points from a year ago.

The “no change” group is where I was over the last several decades despite periodically committing to do better.

Unfortunately, nearly 17% responded to the survey that their living habits had actually worsened, 3.1% significantly so over the six month span since this trend was last measured.

The good news is that during that same span 43% of us felt they had improved their living habits, 7% significantly.  A 2008 study calculated that “inactivity” costs the U.S. $76 billion in healthcare spending.

So I often wonder what finally made me shift gears 19 months ago after years of resolutions and wasted gym memberships.

Was it finally finding a spiritual connection while walking each morning?

Was it having a significant other to do that with, which has been expanded to include weight conditioning twice a week?

Was it using a fitness tracker and a linked app to track the caloric content of various foods I was eating?

Was it being confronted by a tiny belly roll when a portrait was hung to honor three of us just before I retired?

Was it that first sign of a film like build up in one of my carotid arteries?

Intrigued, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer what made me finally get serious.

It is not as though my doctor hadn’t been cautionary for several years about normalizing the level of triglycerides levels in my blood.

I always see the waiting room at the clinic where I get annual physicals full of people who are in much worse shape than I was and seemingly oblivious to the inappropriateness of yoga pants or having to lean over to see their shoes..

Medicare is now going to start holding doctors accountable for patient changes by calibrating what they are paid to outcomes.  But I am not sure how much more they can do to cajole each of us into accepting personal responsibility for our health.

Two years ago, a Pew Study found that 45% of U.S. adults are dealing with at least one chronic health condition but 7-in-10 overall keep track of a health indicator including 19% who have no chronic conditions.

But only a fifth use technological devices such as wearables with nearly half doing so only in their head.

Last year’s report by Endeavor Partners found that 1-in-10 adult Americans owned a fitness tracker, 1-in-4 between the ages of 25 and 34.  Unfortunately, more than half no longer use it and a third stopped using it within six months.

Key for sustainable use, according to the report, are 3 behavioral factors: habit formation, social motivation and goal reinforcement along with 6 other factors such as utility, design, fit, out of the box experience etc.

Fitbit, the one I have used since early 2010 when it came out, appeared to score highest overall among the eight different fitness “wearables” measured in the report.

Juniper Research projects that use of fitness devices and wearables will triple by 2018.  Some analysts project these devices will reach 48% market penetration worldwide by then.

A new Pew study shows that 64% of Americans now own Smartphones, double the proportion from just four years ago.  Smartphones have also rapidly become the means by which low income and disadvantaged Americans go online.

More than 60% of Smartphone owners use their phones to get health information, 57% to do online banking, 43% to look up job information and 30% to take a class or get educational content.

Making outdoor billboard advertising even more obsolete, more than 67% of smartphone owners use their phone for turn-by-turn navigation while driving, 32% do so frequently, compared to less than 1% of Americans who still rely on a billboard.

But wearables such as those for fitness and health are set to make “interruption” advertising such as billboards even more obsolete, according to PwC.

They will accelerate even faster the rapid transition to interest-based, content marketing but only when relevant and needed now.

Studies have shown that the three-decade decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising has reached a negative return on investment overall.

Fitness and wellness apps are on track to more than sextuple by next year from what they were in 2010.  But a report issued last year by PwC shows plenty of reasons that businesses and organizations will soon get involved, too.

Already, 70% of consumers “say they would wear employer-provided wearable devices streaming anonymous data to a pool in exchange for a break on their insurance premiums” something that will obviously catch the attention of insurers in Obamacare exchanges.

The World Health Organization recommends that people get 30 active minutes a day.  A premium feature of the device I wear shows on a bell curve where I fall compared to men my age and weight as well as other demographics overall.

Telling is that at 30 “very” active minutes on average per day, I am in the 89th percentile for my group, or over 185% of the median. For many weeks I average over 40, over 300% of the median.

This means that, unfortunately, I am in the top 11% and regularly in the top 3%.

The center of that bell curve is only 6 “very” active minutes.  Even scarier is that I am 400% over the median for many of those people waiting in my doctor’s office.

People are nearly twice as likely to purchase and use fitness bands and smart watches if employers pay for them.  But the future of wearables goes beyond fitness.

More than half of the adults in the survey agree that automated facial recognition will replace the need to remember names, 56% say life expectancy will increase an average of 10 years and 46% believe wearables will decrease obesity.

But wearables, even for fitness, are rapidly moving beyond devices.  A report yesterday by KUED notedthat consumers are already moving to biometric clothing such as Hexoskin which report metrics beyond those done by devices.

Another by Athos is designed to help with weight and flexibility training.  Analysts project that sales of fitness device wearables will soon plateau or go down due to the overlap between smart wristbands and smart or sports watches.

But sales of smart garments such as Athos are projected to grow to 26 million units next year, up 2,600 times what they were in 2013 and more than two and a half times what they will be this year.

It will be interesting to see if they have a sustained impact on the overall health outcomes for Americans.