When speaking, I often do free association with brands, asking the audience to shout out any word or phrase that comes to mind when I name a brand.

While most brands own a few words, in my experience, only one brand has delivered consistently: Volvo. When I say it, the words “safety” or “safe” are shouted in unison. It’s almost like a cheer sometimes—kinda creepy.

Well, now there’s a website that has taken branding free association a step further.

Brand Tags is “a collective experiment in brand perception” where you view a series of logos and type in the word or words that immediately come to mind for each.

Here’s a tag cloud for a popular American brand:

That’s just a small sampling of the cloud, but you get the point.

Can you guess who this is for? I’ll bet you can.

In case you are wondering, the two largest words in the Volvo tag cloud: “safe” and “safety.”

Comment below to share the word or phrase you would like associated with your brand.

Inspiration for this post came from my partner, Bill Boyd, ABC who discovered it on a CCM discussion list.

The evidence of a recent drive-by marketing attempt in my driveway.

Is it marketing or is it litter?

I occasionally receive little sandwich baggies with a folded-up flyer and a few rocks in it. It’s not really a flyer, it’s more like a scrap of paper. The rocks are obviously there to make it easier to throw out the window of a moving car.

How fitting.

At Outsource Marketing, we have a phrase we use that describes tactical, poorly thought-out marketing: Drive-by marketing.

Drive-by marketing isn’t strategic. It’s what happens when an irresponsible marketer jumps to tactics before they’ve done any research, strategy or planning.

It happens when a short-term thinker wants to “get the word out” quickly or drive leads with little or no consideration for the customer’s wants, needs, wishes or preferences. It’s often ego-driven, and never about the customer.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of a drive-by shooting:

A drive-by shooting (or drive-by for short) is a personal attack carried out by an individual or individuals from a moving or momentarily stopped vehicle. The objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of firepower without attention to accuracy. It often results in the shooting of innocent bystanders or a certain target.

Here’s my definition of drive-by marketing:

Drive-by marketing is a personal attack carried out by an individual or individuals from a slow-moving or momentarily stopped company or organization. The objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of marketing without attention to accuracy. It often results in the wasted time and resources of innocent bystanders, of a certain target and the organization doing the marketing.

I’m all for brave and creative ways of breaking through, but this is worse than spam (you can hit the delete key), sticking flyers under windshield wipers (easy to see and grab), or junk mail (you can recycle it quickly).

No, these little baggies of fun litter my street as they deteriorate and scatter. My neighbors and I get the privilege of literally cleaning up this marketer’s mess. And of course, all the word of mouth generated is negative.

I’d argue that the results are similar with most drive-by marketing attempts as well.

So, where have you seen drive-by marketing?

Comment below to weigh in.

I am one of the few people that saw the very first video on MTV, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” I loved the channel, and I’d watch Mark Goodman and Nena Blackwood for hours on end.

I’m still a big music fan (I love last.fm), but I have to admit, I stopped watching MTV when they quit showing music videos around the clock. I guess I’m a a little out of touch: When I mention a band or current artist at the office, the twenty-somethings laugh at me.

Sniff sniff.

I’m not totally out of touch, but I will say these two public service announcements from MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation caught me off guard.

The first one is pretty funny. The second one is shocking. I wouldn’t play either one in the office or around children.

This ad I’d rate PG13 for Discovery Channel-like animal sex:

The following ad is definitely Rated R for sex and violence:

Made you uncomfortable? I bet.

But Gen Y needs to be entertained or shocked into paying attention, and this is a serious topic: Have unprotected sex and you could die.

So what do you think, Responsible Marketer, has MTV gone to far with the first video? The second? Both?

Comment below to weigh in.

1. Communicate fewer ideas.

Google’s initial success was due to the fact that they eliminated nearly everything from the search page. Remember what search engines looked like before Google? So often, less is more. Two ideas are better than three. But one idea is best.

2. Don’t use big words when small words will do.

Read On Writing Well, twice, and avoid buzzwords like the plague.

3. Don’t be afraid to say less.

Consider Advertising Age’s Ad of the Century, Volkswagen’s “Think Small” from 1959:

+Click to enlarge

4. Reduce word count on the web. . . in print . . . everywhere.

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 6, 2008

5. Sound bites aren’t just for politicians.

Some claim this sound bite was the single most important quote by either candidate during the 1984 Presidential election. It completely neutralized all concerns regarding Ronald Reagan’s age and quashed all hopes that Walter Mondale might beat the incumbent.

What are your key messages? Can you state them clearly and convincingly?

6. Replace the “elevator pitch” with the “pass in the hall” test.

Read Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz to learn more.

7. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Increase your photography budget, use stock photography that doesn’t look like stock photography, and don’t be afraid to hire a professional photographer.

Great photos are a marketing asset worth having.

8. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth?

Video is more affordable than ever. Having a customer say how wonderful you are is worth 100 times what it’s worth when you say it.

9. Simple beats slick every time.

Distill your ideas down to their core to get started, then check out Common Craft’s Explanations in Plain English videos for inspiration.

10. Gimme white space, or gimme death.

Use my formula: Take the amount of space you need, then double it. Then cut your word count by half.

One way to break through the noise is to make less of it.

What can you do to make your marketing simple?

Comment below to weigh in.

One of the best places for Mexican food in Seattle is Gorditos, on 85th in Greenwood. Their burritos are ridiculously huge, modestly priced and delicious. When I say huge, I mean a regular is big enough for two—a large would serve a small family.

Here’s a photo and caption from a 2006 restaurant review in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The $7.50 Gorditos Burrito Grande, billed as the burrito as big as a baby, is almost as big as this 11-week-old. You get a choice of meat in this double-tortilla-wrapped monstrosity.
Photo credit: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Need I say more?

Before I lived in a “built-green” urban village in the suburbs, I lived three blocks from Gorditos and it was my favorite place to eat. I was there enough, the owner usually knew I’d get a “regular-size half chicken, half steak, fajita style, wet burrito with a glass of horchata” without me having to open my mouth. That’s not to say the conversation wasn’t pleasant—she just remembered my order.

The sheer size of the burritos gets people in. The taste keeps ‘em coming back.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing quite like Gorditos anywhere near my work or home, but there is a Mexican restaurant near my office that does a decent business.

Toreros is part of local chain that’s known for great service and authentic food. Their bar does well, their plates are big and the service is friendly, “gracias, amigo!”

Although Toreros can’t match Gorditos’ shock and awe, their tortilla machine gets people talking too.

They fire that baby up and make fresh tortillas right there during regular business hours. You walk in the door and “boom,” that fresh tortilla smell hits you. Kids and grownups gather around the machine and get free hot samples, a la Krispy Kreme.

My kids will watch as long as you let them, and they love the fresh tortillas.

Two questions:

1. Have you experienced a remarkable brand lately?

2. What’s stopping your company from doing something that’s remarkable—that will get people talking?

Can you make the biggest widget? The world’s smallest?

How about the world’s only only chartreuse widget?

Is it possible for you take part of what you create and make it part of your customer experience?

I’d love to hear about it.

Comment below to weigh in.

Here’s the speech that made Pangea Day a reality, the TED prize-winning speech given by Jehane Noujaim’ to an audience of “the world’s leading thinkers and doers” at the annual 2006 TED Conference.

If you don’t have twenty minutes to view her speech, here’s a synopsis from Pangea Day:

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations which are already doing groundbreaking work.

Inspiring stuff.

If you’d like to get involved or simply watch the films, here’s how to take part.

If you watch, please share what you think by commenting below.

It ain’t easy being patient, is it?

In How marketing is like pushing a car, I argued that building a successful marketing effort requires a little patience.

I’ve had a number of side conversations on the topic since then, most saying 18 to 24 months should be enough.

Since the Chief Marketing Officer’s tenure averages 26 months and all-too-often marketing firms are hired by the campaign—not as a long-term marketing partner—that’s no small surprise.

If a company is happy with it’s strategic direction, about two years is probably a fair amount of time.

But a change usually happens when management feels results aren’t coming fast enough, and they lose their patience with the CMO, Marketing Director or marketing firm.

The truth is, strategic marketing takes time:

Ramp-up, research, strategy, plan development, budgeting, and the subsequent execution and deployment of the creative work will take a bare-bones minimum of six months, more realistically a year or longer.

This leaves a CMO, Marketing Director or marketing firm with 14 to 20 months of campaign experience before they are given the boot—barely enough time to apply lessons learned and optimize a marketing campaign. Two full campaign cycles should be adequate.

Don’t get me wrong, being casting responsible means having the perfect-fit mix of people doing the work internally and externally.

But sometimes the right people are the ones you already have—they just need a little more time.

Food for thought if you are considering a change.

So, what has your experience been?

Comment below to weigh in.

In the last week, the above video has been viewed 444,117 times on YouTube.

Question is, what is it?

I did some sleuthing for you.

Go to the video’s YouTube page, and you’ll find a link that takes you to a splash page:

Click on the splash page and you’ll find another page with the video on it, and the following copy:

My friends, my name is Papi. Viva Chihuahuas. We have been dressed in sweaters and carried in purses. I say no mas! I am tired of the jokes about our size. Will not be toys or fashion accessories. Will not answer to Fee Fee or Foo Foo. No mas! Viva Chihuahuas. Who is with me? Heel!

There are no links to click.

No “contact me” fill-in for your email address so they can contact you with more information.

Nothing.

So I did some more sleuthing and discovered this is a viral video produced by none other than…

Disney.

It’s a promotion for a movie coming this fall:

Here’s an entertaining video, probably out to sell jeans. It’s been viewed nearly 800,000 times in five days.

Viral video can be pretty entertaining, however, it often forces you to jump through a few hoops to figure out what’s being sold.

But isn’t it a good thing if the creative gets your attention, the mystery holds it, you interact with the brand and then you tell others?

So, do you love or hate viral video?

And can you figure out what brand the “unbuttoned” video is promoting?

Comment below to weigh in.

Inspiration for this post came from illegaladvertising.com.

I’ve mentioned Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty that encourages self esteem for young girls. It’s smart, it zags when everyone else is zigging, and as the father of young daughter it makes me want to stand up and cheer.

But of course, Responsible Marketing is never black and white.

Dove’s parent company, Unilever, has been taking a beating on the public relations front by Greenpeace and a host of other activist groups for buying from companies that are harvesting Indonesian rain forests to extract palm oil.

Greenpeace took inspiration from Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, creating new viral videos to deliver their message.

Here’s Dove’s “Onslaught” ad:

And here’s the Greenpeace ad, Dove Onslaught(er):

But this story has a happier ending than you might think. Love or hate Greenpeace, their methods are effective, and on May 1, Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau announced a move to certified sustainable palm oil.

Here’s an excerpt from Cescau’s speech at the Prince of Wales’ May Day Climate Change Summit in London:

Palm oil is an important raw material for us and the whole consumer goods industry. We use a substantial amount of palm oil and we want to be an agent for positive change, as we have been in fish, tea and other areas.

We started work on sustainable palm oil ten years ago by developing and sharing our own guidelines and good practices with growers and suppliers, leading to the setting up of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in 2004. Through the RSPO, we have continued to work hard to build an industry consensus on criteria for sustainable palm cultivation.

Now we need to take the next step. Suppliers need to move to meet the criteria, by getting certified both the palm oil from their own plantations and the palm oil they buy from elsewhere. We also intend to support the call for an immediate moratorium on any further deforestation for palm oil in Indonesia.

We are committed to doing this because we believe it is the right thing to do for the people who use our products, for the environment and communities in and around which palm oil is grown and for our business and our brands.

Unilever has gained accolades for sustainability and responsible business practices in other areas, but as the world’s largest customer for palm oil, they done considerable damage to-date.

I have two questions:

1. Do you consider Greenpeace’s tactics on this campaign responsible?

2. Is Unilever responsible or not?

Comment below to weigh in.

Inspiration for this post came from Jeff on OurWorld. Thanks, Jeff.

Ask a room full of people to shout out the single word that comes to mind when you say “Volvo,” 90% will say “safety.” Owning a meaningful word or phrase in the mind of the consumer is the holy grail of marketing, I’d say.

To own a word is expensive and time consuming, isn’t it?

Yes.

And no.

Now you can own a word in less than a minute. If you haven’t heard about The Big Word Project, you soon will.

It’s a simple idea, really. All the words in the English dictionary are being sold at $1 per letter and redefined by the buyer—kind of like naming rights for the rest of us.

The way you redefine a word is you point it to a URL.

I bought a few words:

Not bad, eh?

“Positioning” points to Outsource Marketing. The rest point to this blog.

As I write this, 3,775 word have been purchased. You might think anything worth owning would be taken, but that’s not the case.

I looked up dozens of words relative to marketing responsibility, marketing outsourcing and a number of our client’s businesses and was surprised how many common words are still available.

Of course, since I’m really a 14-year-old boy at heart, my searches devolved to turbo, stinky, boob and poop.

All but the latter are available.

Five reasons you should care:

1. This thing is picking up steam. Social media and viral marketing are driving word of mouth—it’s already been covered by a few hundred blogs, and now traditional media is beginning to jump on it.

2. The site already has a lot of quality inbound links. Since it will link back to you, it should be cheap SEO.

3. Good words (not just silly ones) are currently available but are going fast. Categorically descriptive words like insurer, accountants and medicine aren’t taken yet. If I didn’t hate cybersquatters so much, I’d gobble them all up myself.

4. For defensive purposes. Anyone can buy a word and point it anywhere. Volvo missed the boat. Tecniglas spent six bucks and now owns the word “safety.” In all fairness, even though Outsource Marketing has has a legitimate claim for the name “positioning,” since we’ve positioned hundreds of companies, products and services, Al Ries and/or Jack Trout really should own it.

5. A buck a letter is really, really cheap.

Okay, so buying a word the Big Word Project probably won’t carry quite the same weight as the Volvo brand, but hey, where else can you own a word for the price of a latte or two?

So, which words would you like to own?

Comment below to weigh in.

Inspiration from this post (and my word-buying spree) came from Maren Hogan when she purchased the word “recruit.”