Earlier this year I talked about the remarkable, user-driven Firefox ad campaign.

Well, I’m happy to say that today I joined over 10,000 other web browser geeks to run an ad in the New York Times with each of our names writ small — very, very, very small:

Now, it’s not an outstanding ad as far as ads go.  And since it ran in a newspaper, it has next to nil staying power (we would have done better to put a Firefox sticker on the dashboard of Dale Jr.’s NASCAR Monte Carlo).  But it certainly is a milestone in the history of customer evangelism.

Have you tried Firefox lately?  Over 11 million people have so far, because it’s a great product worth talking about.

Here’s the headline of an article I just read:

Ferrari Outsources F1 Engine Design Work

Shocking!  It got me all worked up.  My mind filled with visions of hell freezing over and Enzo Ferrari’s body spinning (at 19,000 RPM, mind you) in his grave.

I have nothing against the concept of engineers from India working on Ferrari motors.  Bear in mind that the day of tragic, cigarette-smoking Italian craftsmen hammering out Ferraris from stolen Cinzano signs is long gone; today Ferrari’s general manager is French, the chief of design is American, and its head mechanic is British. 
No, what matters to the Ferrari brand is that the motors and cars continue to be designed and built in Italy.  So, no matter where they were born, the designers at Ferrari need to feel, act, and think Italian, imbibing lambrusco, eating pork products and parma cheese, and dreaming of screaming motors whenever they look out at the foggy expanses of Emilia right outside their drawing offices.

But.

Read the article carefully and you’ll see that Ferrari isn’t outsourcing anything.  They’re just buying design software created by the Indian company Tata, and some Indian engineers are going to live at the Ferrari factory (lucky bastards!) to support it.  No engine design work will occur outside of Italy. 

The lesson here isn’t that outsourcing is bad, it’s that the essential Ferrari brand idea that Italy is Ferrari is Italy should be guarded as if it were a life and death matter.  At the very least, Ferrari’s business development people should have put a gag order on Tata. 

Often times effective brand management is more about influencing what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

Though I spent a couple of years getting my MBA (which was a great, fun thing to do), I’m a bit wary of the whole MBA thing in general.  The degree is getting a bit too rubber stamp-ish for my comfort level, as exemplified by this excerpt from a Slate article:

The
Pennsylvania attorney general’s office Monday sued an online university
for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees — including an MBA
awarded to a cat.

Thing is, I bet the cat made some pretty good contributions to the class discussion.  At least enough to get a "2".  Takeaway?  Assess the person, not the degree.  Did they really learn anything?

Great article in today’s NYT Magazine on creating (and paying for) formal mechanisms to foster word of mouth communication around a market offering.

So long as they keep things real, agencies like BzzAgent and Tremor offer a fantastic addition to the traditional marketing mix.  Of course, as with all promotional activities, formal word of mouth campaigns should only be used in addition to, rather than in lieu of, having a remarkable, human-centric offering worth talking about in the first place.  Even better, that offering should be designed to foster word of mouth behavior on its own, so that most of your word of mouth can be earned, rather than bought.

There are blogs that focus on original (or somewhat original) content and thinking, and there are blogs that focus on cataloging and linking to interesting things.  metacool is mostly about the former, but once in a while I find something remarkable that I want to pass along, like this:

I’ve built my professional life around putting humans at the center of business activities.  To that end, I love this Cool News bit about a Mr. Butts of HEB, my favorite (really!) grocery store in Texas.  Want to create a better offering?  Create a culture of deep empathy for your users — HEB gives employees $20 and tasks them to see what it really feels like to feed a family of four for a week on that bill.

The marketing people at Mini do so many things so very well, it’s hard to know where to start.  So let’s begin with the lowly Mini bumper sticker:

I created this sticker in just two minutes at the Mini website.  What’s happening here is quite cool: rather than printing a jillion stickers, dropping them in the mail, and then hoping that someone slaps one on a car (or even worse, selling the stickers, which is what most automakers do), Mini lets you design your own, and provides you with instructions on how to turn it into a sticker.  Odds are only a few Mini whackos will take the time to create a sticker, print it out, and place it ever so carefully on the boot of their Mini.  But imagine the deep and passionate conversations these Mini ambassadors can have with civilians around the world! 

As a marketer, you want evangelists talking about your offering because their voice rings true and pure in a way that yours can’t.  So why not enable them to create true and pure marketing collateral, too?