They don’t use traditional media, their values are based on a strong orientation, and they are the most brand resistant generation ever. Let’s peek inside their heads.

1. Most educated generation yet
2. Closer to parents than previous generations
3. Strong social orientation supported by social media
4. 85% have MySpace and/or Facebook accounts
5. Only 2% interact with companies only online
6. They only open email if they’ve opted into a list from a brand or store
7. Ignore online and offline ads, including social media, use DVR to scoot past commercials, unless they are creative
8. Effective content includes videos, contests, and short articles that relate to their interests
9. Must be approached on their own terms on the media they use, e.g. Facebook, MySpace
10. Deeper brand relationships cultivated through through opt-in email and events

QR Codes haven’t changed much, but the technology that supports them is blasting off. Last year, QR code scans increased 1,600 percent. The ghastly boxes that resemble a cross between rat maze and a Lego® piece are turning up everywhere: packages, buildings, ketchup, TV and even the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Another driver in the adoption of QR codes is the rapid increase in larger-screen smartphone sales, like the Android-based phones and iPhone, which are cannibalizing the market for tiny-screen feature phones. Larger screens make the web easy to use, especially for mobile-designed sites and landing pages.

Mobile Web Pages are a Must with QR Codes
OK, QR codes are cool, but they’re pretty useless without the infrastructure of a mobile landing page or website. QR codes do two things: convey a short text message or launch a URL.

A successful campaign requires a site developed for mobile. That means a landing page that’s pertinent to a specific product, offer or contest. Sending customers to a desktop website will result in a frustrating experience and cost you dearly in response. On September 21, Google emphasized the switch to mobile by changing its algorithm to downgrade pages containing Flash or pages not designed specifically for smart phones.

Do you need mobile landing pages? Check your web analytics to see what percentage of your traffic is generated from a mobile device. Anything above 10 percent indicates an opportunity to mobify your marketing.

Have questions about getting started with mobile? Call Susan Abramovitz at 513-947-1444 ext. 10.

A corporation that runs and manages many unrelated businesses to reduce risk in any specific industry is called a conglomerate. You know them as the likes of Tyco, Loews and American Standard. With all due affection, we know them as cockroaches. And there’s much to learn from our six-legged, turn-on-the-kitchen-lights-and-scream ancestors.

Universally despised for their creepy looks, cockroaches carry diseases like salmonella, dysentery, gastroenteritis, typhoid, and leprosy. They’re easy to hate. But you could also argue that they are one of the most successful creatures on earth. They’ve been scurrying around for 295 to 354 million years, which makes the world’s oldest profession look like a garage startup. How do they do it?

The cockroach business model is like a highly stable conglomerate composed of largely decentralized and varied businesses. The diversity of holding insures survival through any cyclical market fluctuations, or natural catastrophes. Maybe you’ve survived a crashing stock market. Cockroaches have endured high-impact meteors.

Although cockroaches don’t own subsidiaries, the world is their oyster in a way that a CEO can only dream about. Cockroaches skedaddle in 4,000 different species and feast on anything from leather, beer, glue, dried skin and gum to just about any plant, vegetable, fruit or meat. Their version of food is like our money, and they can eat anything.

Like great conglomerates roaches persist with a vengeance. They can live a week without their heads (management beware); a month without food; 40 minutes underwater; and absorb up to 15-times the radiation of humans without dying. And, as you may have discovered late at night, their exoskeleton makes them tough to crush.

Sure, roaches benefit from being omnivorous, and having a tough shell. But they also exhibit group-based decision-making, a sophisticated behavior that accounts for complex actions such as resource allocation and competition. Are your staff meetings this productive?

As a brand, the mighty cockroach is golden. Its DNA, profligate eating habits and interpersonal skills remain unchanged over the millennia.

What we learn from roaches is extreme flexibility in food (money) sources, cooperation and resilience. So what’s your plan?

It couldn’t hurt to add a little roach to your portfolio.

Click for more natural ideas onbrand strategy

1. Do you have a chimp, a partially naked body, or some other clever device to grab attention to your ad? Good.
2. After looking at the chimp, the headline and the logo, will your prospects understand your selling message?
3. Do you have other ads that feature chimps, apes or gorillas? If not, you just have an ad, not a branding campaign.
4. Is your chimp photo stock or original photography? After all, you don’t want your competition to steal your monkey, do you?
5. Aside from a large chunk of shared DNA, does your chimp relate to the ad’s message? If not, you’re just monkeying around. Heh heh heh.

Dictators Attacked with QR Codes

Scan the QR code with your phone and voila! Mahmoud Ahmadinejad finally divulges his regime’s censorship of the press. These nifty ads from Reporters Without Borders blend print, mobile and online advertising to promote journalistic freedom in repressive regimes like Iran, Russia and Libya. See them in action on Adweek.

40,000 Photos for a Picture Perfect Night Sky

After quitting his job as a marketing director, 28-year-old Nick Risinger snapped 40,000 pictures of the night sky while hiking 60,000 miles through the U.S. and South Africa. His amateur photos formed the largest ever, true-color, 360-degree panorama of our Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy feeling completely inconsequential as you scan and zoom about the interactive map.

The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur

A post on the popular Freakonomics blog gives small business owners the tools to survive. Author James Altucher urges entrepreneurs not to sell themselves short during a recession. And if a product sounds too good, it probably is, so don’t lie. Read the full post.

It’s time for marketers and their agencies to bring the heat.

Most hospitals are neither marketing nor customer driven. The result is the commoditization of care and institutions. Patients make healthcare choices by proximity, and what they’ve turned up on the Internet, ranging from Web MD to their Facebook friends. There’s an upside to the educated patient, but not when it supplants the advice of a trained medical professional, or it’s a decision based on the type of price bashing that’s prevalent in everything from dental implants and cosmetic surgery to Lasik procedures for vision. These are serious medical as well as marketing problems.

In this muck, there’s an opportunity to kick hospital marketing to the next level, one that looks beyond the data to understand the needs of patients, families, and yes, doctors. To achieve this we need to revisit a few marketing essentials. While tactical options like social media and mobile apps have exploded in the past few years, strategy has been stuck in the mud.

Sustainable Brand Strategy Saves Money, Increases Impact.

Start with strategy. Worry – and I mean heartburn worry – about the strategy. Your goal is to develop a brand differentiation program that’s valid today and five years from now.

There are many formulations for developing a branding strategy, but the most have these touchstones in common:

• Define the barrier to success with great specificity, e.g. “patients perceive that we don’t have the most modern equipment.” Not a list of barriers. One. And one that can be solved by marketing.
• Describe your target audience with the same details, “females with children, age 25-55, within a 30 mile radius of our hospital.”
• Now the fun part: what do you want to convince them of that will address the marketing problem.” You get one reason. Don’t even think about fudging it, e.g. “we are the most technologically advanced hospital in the tri-state.”
• Why should your target audience believe you? There are always multiple solutions, but you need to pick one and run with it. For instance, “In the past 5 years our hospital has spent $100 million on new technology, more than all our competitors combined.”

The result should be a simple paragraph that anyone on your staff can understand and easily remember. Here’s a quick test to see if your strategy is on track:

1. Is it true, and is it rooted in the basic values of your institution?
2. Is it meaningful to your target audience? Do they really care how much money you spend on equipment? Or do they care about how that equipment can save the life of a loved one?
3. Is it competitive? Are there are other hospitals in your market that could just as easily claim your strategy?
4. Is it preemptive? Is anyone else currently using your strategy?
5. Can you execute? Is it possible to create powerful communication based on this strategy?

Command Attention or Throw Cash in the Commode.

Your strategy could be brilliant, but the way you execute it must break through. Otherwise your marketing is nothing but very expensive wallpaper.
So your next job is to challenge your marketing agency to create its best work ever. Remember, they’ve become risk aversive with your marketing, too. But, if your agency is worth anything, they’ll leap at the opportunity. Give them this charge: 1) Here’s the strategy. 2) Your creative must deliver the strategy. 3) The basic concepts must translate into all media, 4) Knock my socks off.

Have a Conversation, or Become Irrelevant.

Marketing is in transition. The old way is based on telling consumers what the institution wants to say (broadcasting) versus the new path into social and interactive media modeled after conversation.

This isn’t about a matter of placing service line brochures on a website. It’s a sea change in how we think and act as marketers and as a society.

I emphasize this isn’t about social media apps like Foursquare or Twitter, it’s about following the classic communication loop: Listen-Process-Respond. To get someone to listen, grab their attention, the job of creative; give them something worth listening to; pause while they think about it; and listen when they express their feelings and thoughts back. Conventional media, print and broadcast still play a role especially in the attention-getting department. But to close the loop, you’ll need to lead them to social media and the web.

Fakers beware.

Consumers recognize hype and convert it to disbelief and apathy. Weed it out of your marketing like poison ivy. Write copy in plain English. Back up your claims. Demonstrate benefits with data. Read comments on your Facebook page, and respond to them. Monitor social media for negative comments. Publicly admit mistakes and correct them. Insert yourself into the conversation. Listen-Process-Respond.

Own your brand.

Invest in your brand. Own everything that touches it. That means fonts, layout grid, color, texture, and especially photography. When your brand package is so unique it could only be your company, it’s instantly identifiable even if you can’t see the headline or logo.

Money is tight. Your budget will certainly be cut. But with clear strategic direction, powerful creative, and a new outlook on interaction, your hospital brand will flourish on less.

Conversation: For more money than I make in a month, one of these gurus can lecture a company’s higher-ups on the importance of having “conversations” with their customers. I rest my case.

Convergence: What they mean to say is that marketing doesn’t depend on one specific channel anymore. Good branding is done across many mediums: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and even — gasp — print. Just say that.

Human business: This cutesy attempt to make a company seem like it’s more focused on humans is a confusing one. Even zoos and pet food manufacturers are in the “human business.” The focal point of social media is simply engaging customers in your brand. Last I checked, they’re human.

Read more gut-wrenching jargon at Ragan.com.

1. Envision your hospital as a conglomeration of separate companies or rogue states, e.g. radiology, oncology, ER, orthopedics, and our favorite, “The Open MRI Toaster.”
2. Show lots of doctors in your ads. Doctors with their arms folded. Doctors with patients. Doctors with other doctors. Doctors with weird medical devices or doctors in scrubs. All available to you and your competitors on the nearest cheapo stock photo site.
3. Use a safe tagline or positioning theme. Keywords and phrases: caring, extraordinary, we care more, our docs are smarter, excellence, (blank) for life, patients come first, your health comes first, we’re number one, blah, blah, blah.
4. Assume it’s marketing’s job to sell whatever products they’re given. Refuse to act on consumer research, or don’t perform any at all, and deny marketing a seat at the table where real decisions are made.
5. Position your hospital as the experts in a single field: The baby hospital. The heart hospital. The largest colon hospital. The niche positioning is a house of cards next year when your competitors pull ahead in the rankings.
6. Ignore social media because you can’t control it. Pssst, your doctors and employees are already tweeting it up, so might as well listen join the conversation.
7. Pander to internal constituencies rather than serve the huge healthcare information needs of your patients.

   Ignore the fact that patients are smarter than they used to be. They have Web M.D., access to doctor and institutional reviews, drug interactions, and morbidity rates for various procedures.

Here are the elements of a smart strategy:

1. A worthy objective. Ideally it’s attached to a metric. For example: increase sales 20% for BillyBob’s Bar Stools.

2. A clear definition of a single marketing problem that’s standing between your product, and achieving the objective. For example, Billy Bob’s Bar Stools are more expensive than the competition, and Bar Owners won’t to pay the difference.

3. Definition of your target audience. Be as specific as possible: For example, upscale bar owners and restaurant owners that serve microbrews.

4. A single sentence that states your argument. For example, Marketing will convince Bar Owners that Billy Bob’s Bar Stools are a better investment, because they last twice as long as the competition.

5. A convincing and true claim that supports your marketing promise. Billy Bob’s Bar Stools last longer, because they’re manufactured from construction grade steel.Finally, what does your brand sound like? Does Billy Bob sound like a private club, a college bar, or a neighborhood watering hole.

6. Strategy shouldn’t sound sexy, or like advertising. The goal is to present a clear argument for building your brand. As John Lyons said in his book, <i>Guts</i>, Strategy is a well thought out plan to murder the competition.”

With smart strategy, everybody’s happy. Creatives get the input they need. And you, as a marketing manager, will have a benchmark evaluating your agency’s work.