Free Rise

Paying a celebrity to endorse your product is the easiest way to blow your marketing spend for the year.

Getting a celebrity to endorse your product for free, however, is a coup, which is why God created the celebrity goodie bag.

But what happens when a rock-stupid porn star decides to tell the world that your family-oriented, middle American brand really warms her gooey bosoms? If you’re the Olive Garden, you awkwardly try to change the subject.

From the WSJ:
When You’re Here, You’re Family — But What About a Playboy Model?
Olive Garden Has Mixed Feelings About Its Biggest Celebrity Fan

Kendra Wilkinson, a Playboy cover model, television star and one of Hugh Hefner’s three live-in girlfriends, professes deep love for the Olive Garden Italian restaurant chain.

The feeling isn’t mutual.

To the consternation of Olive Garden’s marketers, who have spent millions crafting the franchise’s family-friendly image, the 23-year-old adult-entertainment star and aspiring real-estate mogul repeatedly uses her spotlight to rave about its midprice eateries. Ms. Wilkinson hoists Olive Garden doggie bags in the air and extols its chicken parmigiana. She once scandalized European diners by declaring the Olive Garden preferable to any restaurants in Italy.

Ms. Wilkinson, whose tan skin and blonde-white hair project classic California, isn’t on the payroll. She is a rogue brand ambassador: a celebrity who is genuinely, publicly devoted to a product or service, even if he or she doesn’t quite embody the values that the brand’s managers may be trying to convey.

Executives at Olive Garden declined to discuss the uninvited spokesmodel. One official says the company has tried to walk a fine line with its response, maintaining the chain’s wholesome image without alienating potential customers. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this…because it is a complicated issue for the brand,” says Michele Kay, executive vice president of WPP Group’s Grey advertising firm.

If I were running the Olive Garden account, I’d probably hook up Kendra with free never-ending pasta bowls for life. Or if not for life, at least until those never-ending pasta bowls made her look her look too human for Hef.

The San Diego native says she made frequent trips to the restaurant during her childhood, developing a taste for the artichoke dip and the all-you-can-eat salad and breadsticks. She calls it “my soul food.”

“I love the Olive Garden so much because I grew up going there,” she says. “That used to be the place we would go for Mother’s Day, for birthdays. My grandpa just died, and right after his funeral, we went to the Olive Garden.”

It doesn’t matter whether that’s a quote from Lindsay Lohan or Madeline Albright — that’s a powerfully emotional connection to a brand. It almost makes me want to eat their factory-farmed super-chicken with artery-blocker triple-cream and cheez sauce.

Almost.

As San Francisco’s only Florida Marlins fan, I’m often treated as some kind of genetic freak.

For example, in the 2003 NLCS playoffs, when the whole planet was rooting for an ultimately improbable Cubs-Red Sox World Series, I was in Steff’s every weeknight rooting for the Fish to lay waste to the boys from Wrigley. This aroused no small amount of suspicion and loathing from my fellow patrons. The whole world seemingly wanted the Cubbies in the Series. (Thanks, Bartman.)

The Marlins franchise history has been like Norm MacDonald’s characterization of the sport of cliff diving: “There are two levels. Grand Champion of the World, and stuff splattered on a rock.” Indeed, from their first pitch (the ancient Charlie Hough, vs. the Dodgers — I skipped a college class to see it), the Marlins have spent most of their 16-year franchise history flirting with last place, or hoisting a championship trophy.

So when people find out I’m a Marlins fan, they get a little interested, and often they start asking questions. The main one is:

Why doesn’t anyone go to their games?

Great question, and a complicated one. Even this season, with the team hanging close to first place and a pennant well within the realm of possibility in a weak league, the Marlins are last in attendance. But the empty seats aren’t easily explained in the terms of other cities. To understand the answer, you need to understand Miami. Here are my theories.

1. Miami is an LA-style sports town. People don’t really like sports in South Florida. They like winning. When a team is great, you can’t get a ticket. When a team is just good, locals are generally apathetic. When a team is bad, folks disavow it entirely. (”I was always really a Packers fan.”)
2. The Florida Marlins? Calling the team Florida was a lousy branding decision by Wayne Huizenga, whose feared that naming them after the region’s most famous city would weaken the fan base elsewhere in the region. Which of course is totally, utterly wrong, and discredited by the Miami Dolphins’ and Heat’s regional fan bases. Besides, Florida is a giant state, and few people identify themselves as Floridians first. The California Angels figured this out years ago, even though they failed the rebranding execution.
3. The economics of place. The Marlins don’t really have a ballpark. Much like some other attendance-challenged teams (like the Twins and A’s), the Marlins play in a borrowed football stadium. But unlike those other teams, they play in an ’80s-style suburban stadium, with no nearby transportation (Oakland has BART) or urban core (the Twins have Minneapolis). Even in the formless sprawl of South Florida, Dolphin Stadium is not near anyone’s place of work, so a weeknight game guarantees hours of creeping along the Turnpike.

It’s the economics of place that gives the Marlins any hope of attracting fans. Why do the Cubs, who play in a creaky stadium with no championship banners, sell out every game? Why do the Giants, the Orioles, the Indians draw tons of fans even when the teams are lousy?

It’s because those latter clubs figured out that the ballgame itself isn’t interesting enough for most people to put up with any hassle. But if you play the game in a place where people can walk around, can meet up with friends for a beer ahead of time, and can easily get home afterwards, then the game becomes the centerpiece of a night out, and fans will come. If you surround your stadium with a giant parking lot near a freeway, no amount of gimmickry will sell tickets, much less win over fans who will watch your team on TV, buy hats, and participate in fan communities.

Miami will never be a great sports town. But let’s hope those Marlins get their new stadium downtown, among the empty condo buildings and near actual transit. Build it, and they will come. Don’t build it, and people will stay home and watch Telemundo.

It’s no great revelation that design-by-committee is a mixed blessing. Sometimes you get the iPod.

And sometimes, you get Olympic mascots.

From today’s WSJ:

Here’s Another Olympic Sport: Skewering the Mascots

BEIJING — If the Beijing Olympics’ five cuddly mascots go down in history as a dud, their creator wants no part of the blame.

After China’s Olympics organizers gave him the assignment, folk artist Han Meilin initially sketched out five children representing the traditional Chinese elements of fire, wood, water, gold and earth. Then the bureaucrats got involved. “There had to be a panda, even though you’d think the public would have had enough of them,” says the 72-year-old artist.

Games officials faxed one request after another to his studio for other national images, such as a kite, a sturgeon and ancient cave drawings. So Mr. Han gave them Carmen Miranda-style oversized hats to help hold all the symbolism. As part of the quest to find something for everyone in a country of 1.3 billion, he drew some 1,000 different models, including a dragon and an anthropomorphic rattle drum.

What happens next? Five mascots, a lot of merchandising, and deafening apathy. But it’s the Olympics, in China. Could their be a less likely event to represent individualistic design?

From Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter Blog: “Why I Underwent Psychoanalysis in the Name of Coca-Cola”

Jerry’s market research technique, ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique), is a rigorous and, for me, at least, emotionally draining experience. It gets consumers to express their deepest feelings about a particular product or brand — whether they intend to or not — through a multi-stage encounter that whisks one from grade-school collage-making through something like psychoanalysis and back again.

It’s all fascinating stuff that culminates with the creation of a digital collage to visually represent one’s deepest feelings about Coca-Cola. How do you feel about Coke? How do you really feel about Coke? It’s these types of understandings that lead companies to make hamburgers cheaper, fashionable boots harder to find, and pickup trucks more intimidating-looking.

Here at Yahoo!, we’re experiencing all kinds of emotional reactions from our users. Yesterday we migrated our last users from the old My Yahoo! to the new My Yahoo!, which for many users was a brutal shock. They may have had the same home page for 8 years, and now, after a year-long beta of the new My, their daily ritual has been changed. And change is hard. And some of the abusive tones in users’ feedback reveal just how much their My Yahoo page means to them.

When a brand becomes a relationship is like when a house becomes a home. You move into the empty place. Before you schlepp in all your boxes, you look around and see what the house expects of you. Then you bring in your furniture, your plants, your books, your electronics. You push some things into the basement; your relationships to your possessions change as your stuff adapts to the space. Within a few weeks, you have new habits. Within a few months, the house is a balanced ecosystem, with some resemblances to your last house, but vastly different behaviors.

Eventually, it’s time to move out. And what was once just an empty framework of rooms is now something alive, something you’ll have to destroy.

We have deep and complicated and sometimes turbulent relationships with our brands and products. Incremental change can delight customers. Radical change will usually shock and anger them. And understanding what our stuff really means to them is the first and also the most challenging step to re-winning their loyalty.

From private equity demigod Ted Forstmann, in yesterday’s WSJ:

After Sept. 11, 2001, the Federal Reserve pumped so much money into the financial system that it distorted the incentives and the decision making of everyone in finance. He illustrates this with what he calls his “little children’s story”: Once upon a time, when credit conditions and the costs of borrowing money were normal, the bank opened at 9:00 a.m. and closed at 5:00 p.m. For eight hours a day, bankers made loans and took deposits, and then they went home.

But after 9/11, the Fed opened the spigot. Short-term interest rates went to zero in real terms and then into negative territory. When real interest rates are negative, borrowing money is effectively free – the debt loses value faster than the interest adds up. This led to a series of distortions in the financial sector that are only now coming to light. The children’s story continues: “Now they [the banks] have all this excess money. And they open at nine, and from nine to noon or so, they’re doing all the same kind of basically legitimate things with it that they did before.”

So far, so good. “But at noon, they have tons of money left. They have all this supply, and the, what I would call ‘legitimate’ demand – it’s probably not a good word – but where risk and reward are still in balance, has been satisfied. But they’re still open until five. And around 3:30 in the afternoon they get to such things as subprime mortgages, OK? And what you guys haven’t seen yet is what happened between noon and 3:30.”

When bankers can only lend what they can borrow at a reasonable rate, they consider risk and opportunity cost. When bankers can borrow money at negative real interest rates, and then sell off or syndicate the loans so they don’t even have to care about risk, they’ll lend to anyone with their hand out. Whoops!

And now the May update from Meyersonland:

• The kid is really starting to walk, which is immensely gratifying. She’s always been a physically inert baby — she never really accomplished much during tummy time, couldn’t sit up on her own until 8 months, couldn’t get herself out of a lying position until well past a year. So now it just warms our dark little hearts to see her stand up and toddle confidently. In other news, she just finished writing her second novel, this one a roman-a-clef about life in day care.
• Annette has been massively busy with Shine, but the site is performing marvelously well. She’s had to take her fair share of business trips to LA, NYC, Chicago, which means I get more time with the aforementioned kid. No complaints there. And hey, in my Wells Fargo years I had my share of exotic business trips, including Omaha, Des Moines, Las Cruces, and El Paso.
• And no business travel for me. Oh yes, there was the possibility of red-eyein’ to ATL for a meeting. Thankfully, it didn’t happen; it would have taken me a week to get over my carbon guilt.
• My job is going just fine. Actually, it’s kind of fun to be back in the weeds of Product Management after years of managing teams. I feel like I’m working again.

Finally, a shout-out to my cousin Matt.

From this morning’s NY Times, “For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t“:

In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

Seven years is not a blip. It’s a trend. And there’s no denying the unstoppable forces that created this stagnation:

• The opening of the American economy to global supply competition has forced manufacturing and increasingly value-added services jobs overseas
• The opening of the American workforce to large inflows of immigrants, and the ubiquity of the two-career household, increased the labor supply and pushed wages downward
• Global economic development also put demand pressures on commodities. Oil, food, and materials have never been more expensive
• And America’s three most serious household expenses — housing, health care, and education — were goosed ever upwards by systems that thwarted market forces

But there’s also one input that is utterly discretionary and susceptible to the whims of humankind: taxation. The philosophy of our governments — not just federal, but all levels — has been to regress their tax systems so that the rich pay a lower share of their income than they did before. Economic conservatives promote low and flat taxes as the drivers of economic growth. And they’ve won their battles: As a percent of GDP, US taxation ranks 34th of the 36 largest economies.

Low taxes, however, are not enough to grow an economy. You also need investments. And my family is getting a whopping tax refund this year — one that we didn’t really need — while our neighborhood school slashes its staff, while our freeways clog up, and while the middle class faces higher bills for college, cancer treatments, and dirty energy.

In short, America’s government treats this country like a cash cow business, like AOL or RJ Reynolds. We should be a growth play. But you don’t grow your organization by paying out all your profits as dividends. You have to plow them back into the org.

So let’s invest in America. Let’s redirect our spending to tomorrow’s projects. And let’s fund these investments not from those who can afford it least (or with more debt), but from the ever-wealthier people who have benefited most from this American system.

Yahoo! Shine launched this evening. Annette’s been slaving away on this for nine months — too appropriate for a women’s blog hub, no?

Anyway, go check it out. It’s pretty great.

*****

My kid loves the Vampire Weekend CD.

*****

Finally, we’re hosting a party for Obama on April 13th. If you’d like to hang with like-minded geniuses, email me for an invite.

First there was this offense last spring:

“Assigning a point value to immigrants will keep us from becoming a ’safety country.’ This is America, Jon. Not Wesleyan.”

And then, last night:

“What barista school did this guy do to? Wesleyan?”

OK, what’s up with your hate, o hating writer? Did some Wesleyan dude sleep with your boyfriend?

My beloved, beleaguered, bedraggled Dolphins released Zach Thomas yesterday.

The team is purging salaries now, which is really the only possible direction following its dismal, hopeless 1-15 showing.

But saying farewell to Zach is devastating. Over his 12 years with the team, Zach did his business with excellence — stuffing egomaniacal running backs, picking off ill-advised passes, turning tight end receptions into incompletes, and basically taking away the middle of the field.  He made every player around him better. He never went for the big hit or the big ad campaign, never got arrested in a nightclub, never said a discouraging word. He just racked up Pro Bowls (seven of them) and screwed up the plans of the league’s offensive coordinators.

He may end up with another team in 2008, but his Hall of Fame bust will say Miami. Zach, don’t go!