The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

About the branding of sports events: how much is too much?

Last Saturday, I became a camel. And the straw that broke my back was the fact that The Derby is now called … The Vodafone Derby. Imagine: you’re watching the BBC coverage of the Epsom Derby, one of the most prestigious flat thoroughbred horse races in the world that first took place in 1779 ( the year the Iron Bridge was completed – a British icon of the Industrial Revolution and the first all cast-iron bridge ever constructed). The very properly dressed BBC commentators can’t call it anymore “The Derby” like in the past 227 years. They have to say “The Vodafone Derby” (and they are not allowed to raise their eyebrows;-).

How could such a venerable event in the British life sell its soul to wireless communications merchants? Will the Championships, Wimbledon -commonly referred to as "Wimbledon", the oldest and arguably most prestigious event in the sport of tennis – become the IBM Championships (IBM, as Official Internet Technology Sponsor of the Championships, provides the equipment and services to build and host the Wimbledon Online Shop)? Quite possibly, I’d say. There are plenty of other examples.

In UK football, the 1^st division is called the Barclays Premiership and the 2^nd division has become the Coca-Cola Football League Championship. Confusing? The League Cup has been renamed the Carling Cup. But the FA Cup is still called the FA Cup; the cost of the trick was probably set too high.

International rugby has caught the bug as well. The Six Nations Championship, an annual international rugby union competition held between England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales has become the RBS 6 Nations. At each game, the grass at the centre of the field is ‘painted’ with a giant logo of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

American friends, can you picture a 30-foot Pepsi Cola logo at the center of the pitch for the Super Bowl? Can you imagine the Stanley Cup being called the Budweiser Cup? Probably not, because institutions like the NFL and the NHL have long understood that their brand should not be compromised or ‘polluted’, not to say prostituted. These brands stand proudly by themselves and their sponsors are happy just to take a supporting role, not centre stage.

Maybe it’s time to send the greedy managers and bureaucrats of some sports federations, associations and other respectable institutions to some basic marketing courses before the whole shebang lapses into the ridiculous. What do you think?

“DO NOTHING”

 
Yours competitors are not necessarily where you think and perennial procrastination is often the toughest one.

Good marketers spend a significant amount of time analyzing and outsmarting companies in their market sector. A marketer at Dell focuses primarily on Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and other PC makers. As marketer for Apple in Paris in the early 1980s (Apple Europe had just been founded), I had an Apple II at home and my guests enjoyed playing with it after dinner. One evening, I overheard a friend tell her husband: “… but, if we get one of those, we can’t buy anymore the small sailboat you want so badly”.

Ultimately, they bought the sailboat. This made me realise that our main competitors were not necessarily Commodore and Radio Shack. In that period of ‘market education’, our main challenge was to explain what a personal computer was all about and what benefits it could bring. That’s why Apple promoted the concept of “Wheels for the Mind”.

However, while a marketer has to sometimes compete against a company from a different market, the main obstacle he/she faces much more often is “do nothing”: the prospect is bewildered, unconvinced or frightened and delays the decision to buy. This procrastination can be overcome with stronger, smarter and persistent sales and marketing efforts. But “do nothing” can last for ever. We’ve all been, at some point or another, the one who does nothing, haven’t we?

Random Chronicles #2 – Apple Advanced Technology Group, 1987

Do supercomputers still make sense?

In 1987 (my 7^th year at Apple), I joined the Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino (CA) to manage various R&D support services. One of them was the Engineering Computer Operations, responsible for running Apple R&D’s 3000-node network and its crown jewel: a $15m Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer.

The system was running 24/7, in time sharing mode (its capacity was shared among several users), mostly for Research applications. This was rather costly. The monthly electricity bill alone topped $30k and the total operational costs were in excess of $100K per month.

In the late 1980s, $100k was about the price of a minisupercomputer, a system that was powerful enough for most applications if they could take the full system capacity. And minisupers were relatively small (one standard cabinet) and cheap to run (no need for special cooling other than air).

That’s when I formulated Aebischer’s law of supercomputing: “A full-size supercomputer like a Cray only makes sense if it is used at full capacity, as often as possible, by a single person, like a personal computer”. Otherwise you’re better off buying a personal minisuper to each of your scientific computing users. With $15m you can buy more than 100 minis and save a bundle on operational costs (about $1m per year, enough to buy 10 more minis!).

Every morning, the Cray support team published a diagram showing the system usage for the past 24 hours. I could immediately see if the monster had been used by a single user. One such application I can remember was a model for the simulation of the human ear that the researcher used to run for several hours, after midnight and until dawn, about twice a week.

Another application was the display, in hi-res color and with shadows, of a spinning top that was created from the basic physics equations (look here to see a rough simulation – the one on the Cray featured a ‘real’ spinning top with a nice wood-like texture). We used this simulation as demo for prestigious customers and visitors. Our story was that we had bought a Cray to design the next Mac and that Seymour Cray had bought a Mac to design the next Cray (he had designed the Cray 1 with pencils and paper pads). It was quite exhilarating to drive this £15m engine by the click of a mouse, I can tell you!

Random Chronicles #1 – Apple Europe, 1981

Is there anything like a global market that can be addressed with a single message?

In ‘Wings for the Mind’, I suggest extensions to the original paradigm that Apple created in the early 1980s and briefly describe how the “wheels for the mind” tagline was publicised in Europe.

“As part of the team that created Apple Computer Europe in the early 1980s, I had the privilege to witness the results of an ad campaign we ran in Europe’s main business newspapers. The ad featured a picture of a bicycle illustrating the concept of “wheels for the mind” that Apple was using in 1981 to explain the benefits of a personal computer (the Apple II). The analogy was quite powerful … and successful.

If you live in the middle of nowhere, in a house providing shelter and food, and if you have a bicycle, you can, in one day, explore more territory around the house than if you do it on foot. With a computer, by analogy, you can analyse much more data within a given time, or handle a fixed amount of data much faster. So, the personal computer gives you ‘wheels for the mind’.”

The ad also featured the portrait of a young man, Steve Jobs, who was introduced to the Europeans as co-founder and general-in-chief of the fast growing company. As far as I can remember, here are the results, maybe a tad exaggerated, of the post-publishing survey we ran in the main European markets:

• The Brits, who were quite anti-American at that time, rejected the whole concept as a kind of Mickey Mouse baloney (Clive Sinclair’s ZX80 technological marvel was Britain’s personal computing flagship at that time;-)
• The Germans thought that the whole schmear was a pure lie: such a korporation couldn’t have been founded by such a young guy (and how could a serious computer have a plastic case and use a skimpy floppy disk as external storage)?
• The French liked the intellectual slant and quickly adopted the Apple II as smart product of the Silicon Valley (France quickly became Apple’s largest international market)
• The Italians loved the Apple as hot produce from sunny California (and some quickly saw the possibilities to manage three sets of accounts: for the taxman, for their wife, and the real ones;-)

This shows that even a new concept or technology doesn’t create a global, homogeneous market and that a generic product message has to be packaged and fine tuned differently for various cultures, doesn’t it?

Satisfied employees make satisfied customers

During the industrial revolution of the 19^th century, workers were sometimes treated so badly that, today, you would go to jail if you did that to animals. As illustration, in England, the Factory Act of 1833 stipulated that children younger than nine were not allowed to work; children were not permitted to work at night; and the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours!

However, during this period, some enlightened industrialists had the decency and, versus their peers, the courage to stand out by starting to treat their employees more humanly. And, guess what, they found out that the productivity of their factories increased proportionally to the (relative) comforts of the workers. Could this be a lesson for some countries that, in the 21^st century, still tolerate child labour and worker abuse?

Today, in most of the western world, the focus has shifted to ‘customer productivity’ and ‘share-of-pocket’. How much revenues and profits can you draw from customers and/or what share of their spending budget can you grab? Companies that treat their customers above the mediocre average and obsessively focus on obtaining top notch satisfaction find out that their customers welcome some form of relationship that leads to trust and loyalty. This produces repeat sales, often over a long period. Since selling to existing customers costs significantly less than acquiring new ones, this creates a direct productivity gain.

Satisfaction and loyalty also yield indirect productivity increases. On one hand, satisfied employees become strong advocates of your brand, serve your customers better, and gladly help you to hire good people. On the other, loyal customers often act as enthusiastic recommenders to generate extra sales through word-of-mouth. A virtuous circle. This makes sense, doesn’t it? If yes, why are so many customer-facing employees rather grumpy, badly trained and, apparently, not motivated to deliver good and ‘friendly’ service?