Out of service

You know those people where you say, "I can read him or her like a book?" I don't think I'm that person. My family still can't always tell if I'm serious and joking. I have what seems to be a cynical sense of humor. I don't really think so; I think my humor is more absurdist. On the other hand, I don't even really know what that means, so let's move on. What it comes down to is that it takes a while for some people to get that I'm actually pretty positive and optimistic. Students actually get a more upbeat picture of me than most because I enjoy that part of my day so much.

This is a long way of getting to a pretty surprising conclusion. There was a lot of value to the in-service today and I enjoyed quite a bit of it. Remember that I despise doing this kind of thing. I don't like working in groups. I always feel like I know better than everyone else (because I do know better) and there's always someone who's annoying. And all of that was certainly true, but for at least an hour, I got to discuss some pretty interesting topics with some smart insightful, (and yes, perhaps loud and annoying) people.

The task was to look at a year-old survey of parent attitudes towards the school compared to other somewhat similar schools. At the heart of the discussion was an age-old marketing problem. You have a product and a market that seem to be mismatched in some fashion and you ask yourselves a couple of questions. Is it a problem with the product? Or, is there something the market doesn't understand about the product that can be mitigated by a good communications effort?

The kinds of answers depend on the product, of course. My first advertising job was on a product called Coast soap, made by Procter and Gamble, the largest soap manufacturer in the world. They make many kinds of soap- Ivory is the biggest seller- and as a result each brand they sell has to have it's own specific niche in the market. Otherwise you're competing against yourself. Coast's "Positioning," as we advertising dudes call it, was The Refreshment Soap. It was a pretty blue and white color, meant to evoke surf, I think, and had a strong but pleasant, upbeat kind of scent and made lots of lather when you used it in the shower. The tagline was "The Eye-Opener" and we made funny commercials about draggy people suddenly being perky after showering with the soap.

Coast was very successful for a while, but by the time I was working there it had entered a slow decline in sales and everyone was scurrying around trying to turn it around. The reason for the decline seemed obvious enough. People get tired of the smell or it loses its novelty and you don't really smell it any more (the dreaded olfactory wearout), plus it made all that lather because it dissolved quickly and therefore got used up quickly, making it expensive to use over time.

The lathering/dissolving thing was fundamental to the product and there was nothing to be done about it. So clearly, the way to go was to change the scent (or offer a second scent). And here the company put itself in a box. The Chief Marketing Poobah (I think that was his title, maybe it was VP or something boring though) stated from on high that if Coast as it currently existed was The Refreshment Soap, how could something else also be The Refreshment Soap? Logically, that couldn't be true because, as we all know, if you call something "the" it implies that it's the only one.

Everybody looked at the CMP and nodded and agreed and we moved on to advertising slogans and packaging and such. Coast's sales continued to decline, the ad agency where I worked was fired and P&G eventually sold the brand to rival Dial. But how stupid was that? There's only one kind of refreshment? Rather then violate the brand positioning you'll blow up the entire thing?

To make a long story maybe not so long, soap is a simple and people choose their soap for simple reasons. A product change was needed. A school is a very complicated product and it's possible for there to be both product and communications changes needed. So that was what we spent the morning discussing. The funny thing is, the problem for Coast was that the positioning was too inflexible. For the school (and though this is only my opinion, I know I'm right), the problem is that there is no positioning. Maybe there once was but it didn't survive the move and name change. Fixing this requires some deep thought and tough decisions about what exactly our product is and does. That was the part of marketing that I really liked, but nobody asked me (which is too bad because, as I said, I really do know better).