Talking with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly earlier this week, Trump appeared to be edging toward a deportation policy not much different from the one adopted by the Obama Administration. “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country,” he said. “Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.” Then, speaking to CNN on Thursday night, he backtracked, saying that under a Trump Administration all undocumented immigrants would have to leave the country before applying for legal status.
.. In many rebrandings, there is a tension between the urgent need to change public perceptions of the company and the danger of alienating existing customers and stakeholders.
.. A successful rebranding campaign has to have two elements. It must be surprising enough to attract people’s attention and make them think again about a company or product. And it must be credible.
This exercise never passed the credibility test. In 2005, a BP-owned refinery in Texas blew up, killing twenty-five people; in 2006, a pipeline owned by BP failed in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude; and, in 2010, the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a huge oil spill that threatened the entire Gulf Coast. Six years later, BP is still struggling to recover from a huge hit to its finances and reputation.
.. The “Beyond Petroleum” fiasco proved that you can’t deny who you are.
.. If he’s looking for guidance from the corporate world, Trump could do worse than reading up on the recent history of McDonald’s
.. It was all partly a con, of course. As McDonald’s broadened its menu choices, it still sold huge amounts of unhealthy fried food.
.. McDonald’s turnaround came “not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches
.. McDonald’s rebranding was effective because it challenged perceptions of the company without undermining its core value proposition: cheapness and convenience
.. Given how central immigration has been to Trump’s campaign, announcing a more humane approach toward the undocumented could send a forceful signal that he is willing to compromise
.. He’d also need to do some damage control with his base, of course. If he does change tack on deportations, he could also make clear that he still intends to build a wall across the southern border, and to make it much harder for foreigners from other parts of the world, particularly Muslims
.. Kellyanne Conway, the veteran Republican polling expert he brought on as his campaign manager, is reportedly pushing for a U-turn on immigration, and so is Chris Christie.
.. Is he in it to win? Or is his real goal to build up the Trump brand among conservatives and ultra-conservatives, perhaps with the ultimate ambition of launching a media venture?
.. If winning is a secondary concern, it might make more sense to stick with his existing policy and preserve his image as a conservative renegade.
Yes, Even Your Company Video Needs Conflict
If a company doesn’t set up conflicts before addressing how their brand handles those issues, the content they’re producing ends up predictable, dry, and boring. If the stakes are low, the content risks resembling a laundry list of bland talking points: “We’re the best!” and “You should really work with us.” It’s immediately lost in the noise of an oversaturated market.
But, if a company instead 1) successively introduces problems, and then 2) passionately showcases how their team attacks those problems, the stories they tell are likely to be bold and unique to their brand.
.. Stories need to be transformative. What makes a story transformative is when it solves a problem that exists because of conflict.
.. It might make you feel vulnerable to discuss hindrances, but it will ultimately make your solutions stronger and your company’s story more human.
Why Behavioral Economics Is Really Marketing Science
Ironically, the discipline of marketing was started by economists!
A cynical economist would even hold that marketing activity hurts the efficiency of the economy. Promotions distort the true price and lead consumers to buy on brand name, not real value.
.. Behavioral economics attacks the crucial assumption that consumers engage in maximizing behavior. Aiming to maximize utility or profits is the key to building economic decision models. Otherwise, economists would have to work with another assumption, that consumers are basically “satisficing,” stopping short of spending time to maximize and being happy enough to achieve enough of what they want.
.. If economists now have to study and explain how consumers actually make their choices, they need to turn to marketing. For a hundred years, marketers have collected data on what, how and why consumers buy what they buy. The data is there. The only conclusion we can draw is that behavioral economics is, ironically, another word for marketing. Marketers have been the behavioral economists!
The Facebook of ecommerce
That particular story is perfectly well written, but it’s read because it’s in that magazine and that magazine is bought because it’s on the rack, and now people don’t come to stories like that anymore. And equally, that particular product is bought because it was ranged and placed at eye level, and now it’s not going to be being bought like that either. Today, those stories get their traffic, very often, from Facebook ..
.. Amazon is great at selling you what’s on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it’s not very good at showing you what’s on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It’s not so good at selling the mid-list – things that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it’s not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn’t work so well.
.. we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it.
.. Without that, we’ll have more of the polarisation one can often see in ecommerce today, between bestsellers on one hand and the long tail on the other with the middle squeezed.
.. So, someone needs to do the demand generation – to tell you there’s something you might want.