The most recent “case study” that has gotten a lot of attention is Johnson & Johnson’s advertising for its pain relief product, Motrin. Now, one would have thought that a big sophisticated marketer like J&J, and its subsidiary company McNeil Healthcare, would not be challenged by relating to their customer base. After all they’ve got to have tons of research about and experience with their customer base, right?

Yet, the animated ad for Motrin presents a mom who complains that wearing her baby (in a sling or carrier) is hurting her back, so she pops some Motrin. This ad was an attempt to connect with moms through the common experience (and pain) of carrying a new born child. But according to many Twittering moms the message takeaway was that moms wear their babies as fashion accessories, or because it “totally makes me look like an official mom.”

All along the TV spot seemed to be relating to their target market, until BOOM!

Motrin missed the mark…because the brand totally misread their consumer.

Now no marketer is perfect. We all make mistakes. But this experience begs the question about the quality of the brand’s consumer insight and the ability to properly interpret it to drive a relevant messaging strategy. Advertising pretesting could have/should have also been used to determine if the message/creative concept was relevant or…a lightning rod. Yes, pain is a problem…but carrying a baby in a sling is not a fashion accessory!

Since the advertising was pulled, J&J’s marketing VP has sent out apologies to bloggers and J&J has issued a formal apology on their official blog. But, will that be enough to satisfy their customer base or will they lose some profitable share points?

So my brief summary is this:

In today’s world, being in close touch and empathizing with the consumer base is more critical than ever because one misread or misstep can create an outrage that can really hurt a brand in a viral way.

Like one blogger said: Motrin: If you’re going to be hip and in the know, you need to actually be hip and in the know.

Several recent studies have shown consumers reporting a greater willingness to purchase green products than their behaviors indicate, the exception being when a direct cost savings will be experienced by using a green product.  For example, in a 2008 NAHB study of homeowners, over half said they would be willing to pay $5,000 - $11,000 more upfront for green features on a house if those features would reduce their annual utilities.  However, interest was limited in green home features that had no efficiency advantage.

Similarly, consumers regularly report that a company’s environmental record is important to their purchase decision.  However, the Shelton Group’s 2008 Eco Pulse study found that only 7% of consumers could actually name a recent purchase where the manufacturer’s environmental record played a part in their purchase decision.  Being thought of as considering the environment in purchases may be important to consumers, but not important enough to drive a purchase decision on its own.

So do the green products that are actually selling owe their success to the environmental concern of the consumer or just the desire to save money over the life of the product?  How should this shape our marketing strategy decisions?  If 70% of American consumers feel that calling a product “green” is usually just a marketing tactic (Ipsos Reid, 2007), would the better strategy be a focus on a product’s efficiency message while leaving the environmental message to a sub point?

The Fall of 2008. Generations from now will remember it as the fall of the financial markets and a crucial turning point in global economics. So many slick, opportunistic decisions made by very clever financiers over the past decade are coming back to bite us… decisions laced with so much greed… stimulated by so little control and oversight. Unbridled opportunism has caught up with Wall Street—and us.

Are we on the brink of the same type of meltdown in branding?

Just as in the financial markets, branding has become slick and sophisticated over the past decade. A casual walk down the business book aisle at Barnes & Noble will attest to that. Dozens upon dozens of branding books are packed tightly together competing for attention. Marketers rush to them looking for the next big idea in manipulating their brands to create ever-higher levels of customer addiction.

Have emotion-based brand connections become marketing’s subprime mortgages? Have customer relationship marketing (CRM) and “cult branding” schemes become a marketer’s equivalent of credit default swaps? Have we resorted to cheap brand value builders while ignoring the true value the customer receives from using our products?

I’ve criss-crossed the United States, Canada, Eastern Europe and the Middle East over the past few years talking to hundreds of business owners and marketing professionals. And I hear a consistent strain of thought: “How can I improve how I talk about my brand?” But, what I’m hearing very little of is, “How can I improve the core product and service my brand represents?”

What I mean by this… our profession seems more concerned with how well we’re communicating our brands than making our brands stand for better products/services that meet the needs/desires of consumers better. It’s an artificial inflation of brand value at the expense of product value.

Should we spend more energy coming up with better products than better tag lines? Should we be focusing more of our attention on true consumer problems than on clever online interactive tools? Should we invest more in product research and development than in researching brand equity scores?

Do I have an answer? Unfortunately, not entirely yet. But I’m working on it. Diligently. Even so, the question still begs to be asked. And a peer dialogue needs to result. So, thoughtful marketer, what are you seeing out there?

Traditionally, taking part in activities like crossword puzzles have helped keep the mind sharp and preserve brain health and cognitive abilities. With technology increasingly becoming part of everyone’s life, scientists have begun to assess the influences of computer use and the Internet.

According to principal investigator Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA who holds UCLA’s Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging,

“The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults. Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function.”

The team at UCLA studied 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half of the participants had experience searching the Internet while the other half had no experience. Education level and gender were similar between the two groups. The study mainly consisted of the difference in brain activity between book-reading and Internet searching while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

“Our most striking finding was that Internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading - but only in those with prior Internet experience,” said Small, who is also the director of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center.

Further research and additional details on the study can be found in Small’s new book, “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” published on Oct 14^th.

With that paradigm change, expertise and mastery of a specific discipline is more important than ever. Just think about other professions – doctors, attorneys, architects, realtors. They are all specialists. Sure they have to work with other specialists, as do we, but they are the experts in their field of study. Now, so are those in the communications profession, which is why differentiating oneself amongst your peers is so important.

Let’s take my discipline, public relations, for example. With a growing and better understanding of what PR practitioners do – from strategic development and crisis communications, to C-level executive counseling – most clients want to know how experienced and credible their spokespeople are going to be. Let’s face it: we are going to, in many times, be the face and voice of your company or product or be advising your spokesperson.

Not only does expertise matter, but more and more clients are starting to ask for it. They are demanding more strategic, sophisticated communications counsel, as well as a want of professional certification as hiring and promotional criteria in the U.S. and abroad become more competitive. In the PR profession the highest level that one can obtain is called accreditation. It is signified with an ‘APR’ designation by one’s name. Fewer than 25 percent of PR practitioners are accredited.

Accreditation is the hallmark of the public relations profession and signifies mastery of the public relations body of knowledge and the holder’s commitment to ethical behavior. It demonstrates broad knowledge, experience and professional judgment in the field. APR demonstrates that individuals have the knowledge, ethics and experience to set them apart.

To earn the APR designation, one must pass an examination that consists of an oral presentation to a panel of senior-level PR pros and pass an exam that tests 60 specific knowledge areas from within 10 areas of professional practice such as research, planning, implementing and evaluating programs; ethics and law; communication models and theory; business literacy; management skills; crisis communications management; media relations; information technology; history; and advanced communication skills.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful if you don’t have it, but it’s the equivalent of working with an accountant who is a CPA or an architect that is AIA. There is an instant credibility that you are working with a seasoned and proven pro when that designation is beside your name. And those designations are making more and more of a difference.

Brett Turner, APR, is Public Relations Director of Jackson-Dawson Marketing Solutions in Greenville, S.C. Turner is President-Elect of the South Carolina Chapter of PRSA and also serves as the Chapter’s Accreditation chair.

Is our economy crumbling? Is capitalism in danger? Are the days of the free market system numbered? Should we even care about all of this, or will it all sort itself out?

And many of the questions aren’t about the overall economy, they are more personal. What about my retirement savings? Is there any way I will ever be able to sell my house? Are our bank deposits safe? Will I even be able to find gas for my vehicle tomorrow?

At the one time in the era of modern marketing where communication is desperately needed, the silence is deafening. At a time when people want to know how it happened, what to do and how to keep it from happening again, answers are absent. Confusion abounds . . . from Capitol Hill, to Wall Street, to Main Street. Sure there is the traditional political posturing and soundbites from both the right and the left, but no real explanations or answers.

Companies have crisis communications plans, but our economy obviously does not. The actual answers to the questions are not the most important thing. The most important, and disturbing thing, is the absence of any answers at all.

At a time when people want and need communication . . . where is it?

According to an article in 1to1 Magazine, Accenture is making bold moves to help their 180,000 employees get to know each other a whole lot better. Using web 2.0 technology, Accenture is moving toward what they call the Borderless Workplace Initiative.

The article quotes Frank Modruson, Accenture’s CIO as saying:

We feel with this kind of technology the advantage will go to the early adopters. The core of our initiative is bringing social networking into Accenture, to bring the power of every employee together to make it easier to do business.

So their Borderless workplace includes the following:

• A wiki call Accenture Encyclopedia which is a media exchange resembling YouTube
• Personal blogs for employees
• A social network for employees so they can collaborate, share knowledge and find subject matter to answer customer questions.

The company also developed 148 customer microsites to help its marketing and sales teams develop stronger customer relationships. Each site acts as a portal for each client’s team so members from every customer touchpoint have access to the content and receive feedback through the site. The sites can also leverage all of Accentures social media tools including discussion boards, podcasts, video streams and wikis.

Accenture measures both hard and soft metrics to see how well the concept is utilized. Cost of operation is how the company measures ROI and they say with the reduced travel costs from telepresence alone the intiative is a slam dunk. They plan to roll the program out by the end of the year.

Accenture says it has shaped its culture around networking, sharing, connecting and teaming. Any company or organization who wants to stay out front in the race for innovation and efficiency should go to school on what Accenture is doing with social media.

For companies both large and small, its time to embrace social media from the inside…out.

Any application that involves programming logic has the potential of growing larger than anticipated if not thought out completely before even one line of code is written. Even developing features as seemingly simple as contact forms can lead to problems if everyone (developer, administrator, account rep, client) does not have a written out and signed-off specification sheet. Issues of “scope creep” often happen if a project is based off ambiguous or nonexistent specifications.

There are a lot of reasons why spec sheets are brief or nonexistent. The additional time needed to create them and the confusing and technical verbiage that may be used in them could affect the negotiation process. Often, clients resist signing off on anything technical if they believe it will pigeonhole them into a corner. These are all valid concerns. However, a complete, understandable, and agreed upon specification sheet remains an instrumental part of any development project. Before proposing or starting a project of any significant size, serious thought should be given to the need and importance of well thought out spec sheets.

The easiest way to make sure that your cross links are giving you the most search engine value is to keep an organized list of your keyword distribution in front of you when you are writing new pages.

When writing page A, link to page B with the keywords that are assigned to page B. By doing this you will always create a quality cross link. Use as many keywords as you can when cross linking throughout your website and please, never use click here. You’re not trying to rank for click here, so DON”T USE IT.

For other SEO Quick Tips, check out our Title Tag and Meta Descriptions tips.

A web site is more than a first impression. It is your Director of First Impressions. In most organizations, Director level positions are held by those who are experienced enough to make strategic decisions on behalf of the company. Directors also carry the accountability that goes along with this level of responsibility. Suggesting that a company place a $10/hr temporary employee in a Director role would be completely out of the question.

Is your web site a Director of First Impressions (i.e. experienced, responsible, leading users in the right direction) or is it a $10/hr temporary employee that’s more interested in doing its own thing and leading people off your site by design or lack of support? Do you pay your web site what it’s worth or is it an underpaid, underdeveloped representative of your company?

As fiscal budgets are being reviewed, perhaps it is time to evaluate what you are willing to pay (spend on) your website.