The Pepperspective

We don’t usually think of Easter as the most important marketing holiday of the year. But for one category, it is the mecca of marketing. Easter (or as I like to call it: “the Black Friday of church shopping”) can actually teach us several lessons beyond the baskets of marshmallow candy and hidden egg hunts (not that I’d turn down either of those things). Maybe you’ve never thought about the marketing need for present-day congregations, but I guarantee that the congregations in our communities are thinking about it. In the end, there’s more than one parallel between evangelism and marketing, and we can certainly learn things from each other.

So, what can churches teach us as marketers (especially when churches are technically selling a product that doesn’t even belong to them)?

The more time I spend honing my culinary skills, the more I realize how many marketing lessons can be learned in the kitchen. One of my favorite ways to learn what works and what doesn’t with food is by watching. Specifically, the show “Chopped.” 

Chopped is a high-energy, fast-paced cooking competition that challenges four up-and-coming chefs to turn a selection of everyday ingredients into an extraordinary three-course meal in a finite amount of time. After each course, a contestant gets “chopped” by a panel of esteemed judges until the last chef standing claims victory and a $10,000 cash trophy.

There’s a day between the Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, an unassuming little box on the calendar that usually gets short shrift in terms of attention.

 As lifelong fans of the underdog, we pinpointed that day (March 16th), gave it its own holiday name (DragonMaid Day), and have now focused an enormous amount of energy to making it a day we’ll never forget. 

Here’s the plan: we’ve divided the whole company into six special task forces, each commissioned to gain major headway on a heretofore secret project by DragonMaid Day. 

Confession time. I’m a foodie and a Travel Channel junkie. And when I’m not marveling at Andrew Richman’s magnanimous, meat masticating “Man vs. Food”, drooling over a deluge of “Diners, Drive-ins & Dives” with Fieri as my “Guy-d”, or blenching at the unflinching bravery of Bizarre Foods’ Andrew Zimmern, I’m riveted to the ardent, bohemian rantings of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.”

Those who know “No Reservations” know that it is, in simple terms, nothing short of food porn. Which is to say that Anthony, or “Tony” as his crew calls him, travels the globe enjoying the kind of gastronomic experiences about which most folks merely fantasize. And it’s all captured on video, edited, scored and played back for my hedonic, voyeuristic enjoyment in gratuitous sixty-minute segments.

Sure, there are nods to the cultural aspects of the places Tony visits, along with plenty of nods from Tony to himself. Which is part of the show’s appeal. But mostly it’s about the food. Which is probably why the inaugural episode featured the comestible wonders of Paris, France. 

A hundred episodes later, Tony and the crew returned to Paris to find that something strange and wonderful was going on. Change. And not just any change. A change in the way Parisians think about, prepare and consume food. While watching, I couldn’t help but notice how this change is reflective of the shifting way in which we Americans think about, prepare and consume media.

While many brands are gobbling up oodles of precious time and money gunning for Google’s coveted, number-one, unsponsored, search result listing, a handful of progressive, pioneering brands are moving on to the next thing-a thing so new that it has yet to become an acronym.

Whether you work with a full-service advertising agency or have an in-house marketing team and creative department one thing is certain. There are ways to ensure the best possible results. Chief among these ways lies the challenge of being the best client you can be. Which is just as hard, if not harder, than being the best agency.

Next Wednesday, two of Nashville’s best minds in marketing (and myself) will spend a morning sharing career insights about how to build brands, connect with audiences, and understand the ins-and-outs of modern marketing. It is sure to be informative, interactive and inspiring to all who attend.

The day will begin with Courtenay Rogers, Marketing Coordinator for Bone McAllestar Norton who will show how marketing means something different for everyone, setting us free from the tyranny of a single definition.

Creative Director and CEO of Werkshop Marketing will follow with a robust lesson in brand building, providing tools and understanding for constructing a proper brand.

I’ll have the pleasure and challenge, like the rug in “The Big Lebowski,” of tying the room together, which I will attempt to do by giving attendees a concrete model that can be immediately applied to any marketing situation for improved results in marketing to (or rather “with”) the 21st century consumer.

Admission is only $99 and comes with a subscription to the Nashville Business Journal, which you can keep for yourself or pass along to someone else.

I believe I speak for everyone when I say, I hope to see you there.

Good marketing to you, always.

According to statistics from the National Coffee Association, Women indicate that drinking coffee is a good way to relax. Men indicate that coffee helps them get the job done.

Neither of these are true. But don’t blame the NCA for the falsehood, blame the people they asked. They are the culprits. They are Americans. And they are lying. But not on purpose. No. They lie because they don’t know the real reasons they drink coffee.

Can a functional QR code be built out of nothing but OREOs? We decided to find out.

An article in a recent issue of Advertising Age quotes Glenn Murphy, CEO of Gap Inc. as saying he was “disappointed” with marketing efforts for Old Navy, the company’s largest brand.

Later on in the article, Groupon’s CEO was quoted as saying, “…you can’t rely on anyone else to control and maintain your own brand.” This comment was in reference to the Tibetan ads that ran during the most recent Superbowl and the notion that he had placed too much trust in the agency who created the ads.

In 1927, a lone farmer in Iowa began planting a new type of hybrid seed corn of which none of his fellow Iowa farmers had ever heard. One year later, three more farmers had planted the seed. One year after that, there were 8. The next year there were 12, then 18. The following year, five years after the first farmer began planting this new, high-performance seed corn, one more farmer joined the fray. By 1933, 25 farmers were planting the seed.

You’ve probably never heard of the Universal Law of Awesomeness, but it goes something like this:  If you want to be awesome at something, there are only two steps you must take.

1.  Learn all the rules.
2.  Play the game better than anyone else.

If your game is advertising, you might be tempted to argue that there aren’t rules to it anymore. Or at least that the good players break those rules all the time.

It’s a seductive argument, and it’s dead wrong. 

We’ve recently been working with a client to increase their Facebook page likes. There are of course various ways in which you could do such a thing. Many involve liking a page to interact with a particular bit of content. It’s basically an admission fee which most Facebook users are very willing to pay.

You know how you make signup forms for contests and things where people have to manually enter their basic info then click submit? Repetitively typing in their email, address, and phone number over and over just to be entered for a chance to win a magic eraser or pair of flip flops or something? Well, Facebook has added a pretty useful upgrade to the Graph API that will get that info for you automagically. If a user allows it that is.