?While I originally intended to have a fourth part, I realized that it would be best to give you his insights into one final document.
If you’ve missed parts 1 and 2, click on the following links to get the complete interview:
Marsha Friedman: We’ve covered so much information, Al, and it’s all been so good. I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I have two questions I want to make sure I ask. First, what are your thoughts about marketing today, as compared to the seventies and eighties when we didn’t have things like the Internet,
Website To Georgetown 11s For Cheap But Real Shoes, social networking, social media marketing, blogging, etc.? How has it changed marketing and do you think it’s better?
Al Ries: Well the Internet is a new medium and we don’t get very many new media. Before the Internet, the previous "new" medium was television. So over a course of history, you can see that "new" mediums took a long time to develop. First there was the printing press created by Gutenberg several centuries ago, which gave us the printed book and the periodical (which includes both newspapers and magazines). Then several hundred years later, we got radio and finally television, and now we have the Internet.
Every medium changes society. One may ask, "What is the key consequence of the Internet?" It’s the first global medium. You see, radio,
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Womens Georgetown 11s Low With Best Quality, newspapers, magazines, books they all are basically national. We have books published in Germany, Spain and many different countries. But each of those editions is published by different people in different forms and unique to those various countries.
A book is not a global medium like the Internet,
Big Size Georgetown 11s Low Up To 52% Off. Every day of the week with the Internet we correspond with people in China and in countries around the world.
In Marshall McLuhan’s terms, "the medium is the message." So, what is the message of the Internet? What are the social consequences of this medium? The social consequences are the homogenization of the world. Wherever you go in the world today, you see the same brands. It’s incredible. My wife and I were walking on the Great Wall of China and my wife said, "Let’s stop for a Gatorade." Sure enough, they had Gatorade. This is China, right? Another example, I got an e mail this morning from our associate in Vienna. He asked me, "What’s this Excelsior Jewelry being sold by Steven somebody or other in Los Angeles?" I said, "I never heard of this." He said, "Oh, they’ve got stores around the corner of." I think to myself, "Wait a minute!" I am closer than he is and yet HE is more familiar with it, because of the Internet.
I do a monthly article for two publications in China. They send me some questions and the latest question is, "We’re interested in the Disney brand, etc., etc." So, again, the social consequences of the Internet, the homogenization of the globe,
Store Online Georgetown 11s Us Outlet Store, is that we’re becoming a monolithic society. More and more, everything around the world is the same. Eighty percent of Coca Cola’s profits are from outside the United States.
Interestingly enough, here is the really meaningful idea when it comes to marketing. To explain this, let me give you an analogy. If you lived in a small town of just one hundred people, how many stores would you find? Probably one. And, what would that store sell? Probably everything. I mean food, clothing, boots, shoes everything people needed in general, hence the general store. Boom!
You move to a big city where there are millions of people and what do you find? You find specialty stores. Not just clothing stores, but women’s clothing stores, children’s clothing stores, men’s clothing stores,
Authentic Jordan 11 Georgetown For Cheap Shoes, dry cleaners and super markets. The principle is this, the greater the market, the bigger the city, the more specialized the brands have to become. The implication or the consequence of the Internet, the message of the Internet is as we become more and more of a monolithic world, the brands will have to become more narrow, more focused to stand for something locally. And that’s going to be a challenge.
Everyone wants to be what I call a monolithic brand, a brand that tries to have a full line of products and services for everybody. It’s just not going to work. Why? Because as more and more companies compete in a single market, each one of those competing companies has to be more narrowly focused.
In America,
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The Premium Quality Georgetown 11s For Cheap Shoes, whose initial focus was on personal computer software. If you lived in Guatemala, where there are only three million people, could you start a company to just do personal computer software and grow like a Microsoft? I don’t think so. Invariably in a big country like America, we have companies that you couldn’t possibly start in a smaller country. Why? Because the smaller the market, the broader you need to be and the bigger the market the more narrow you have to be. As we become global,
Order Cheap Jordan 11 Georgetown For Cheap Shoes, the logic is, "I’m going to sell my products around the world, so I have to have a broader line, because there are a lot of different people around the world." That’s the logic. That’s not practical marketing. If you’re going to sell globally, we have to have a narrower line.
We work with a lot of companies in smaller countries and I can tell you that a typical company in a small country is very different than a typical company in
America,
Authentic Mens Georgetown 11s Fast Delivery. A company there can be in food and banking and automobiles and all sorts of stuff. That would never work in America.
In Finland,
Clearance Outlet Store Georgetown 11s For Sale Shoes, a country of five million people, they have a company whose product line is narrow. The company is Nokia and their products are sold around the world. Why? Because Finland is too small, so to build a big company in Finland, Nokia had to think globally. We don’t sometimes think globally because America is big enough that you can produce a pretty big company if you just sold to Americans. But you’d better be thinking globally, because if you don’t, somebody will come into America with their global brand (like IKEA for example) and they’ll take your business away. So globalization is the idea that has really, really been driven by the Internet.
Marsha Friedman: What a different world today. Amazing! I would be remiss, being that I am in the PR business, if I didn’t ask you about your book, The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR. I could quote you forever from the book, because it really is an important message that businesses need to hear. Could you just comment,
Online Authentic Georgetown 11s With Best Quality, because I’d love to have it coming directly from you, as to why PR is so crucial in establishing a brand and planting the seed?
Al Ries: The issues here have to do with credibility. In other words,
Where Can i Buy Georgetown 11s Right Version For You, the average ad has little credibility. And there are lots of reasons for that. One of which is there is too much advertising. As a result, the average person doesn’t necessarily believe much of what he or she reads in the ads. That’s no problem if you have a strong brand. In other words, Rolex can run ads and people will believe it because they know Rolex, they know it’s famous and they know it’s one of the most powerful brands in the world. Their friends and neighbors brag when they buy one. But when they see an ad for a brand they’ve never heard of, their tendency is not to believe a single thing they read. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of research that says most people won’t even look at an ad for a brand that they’ve never heard of on the basis that, "If I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be any good."
Marsha Friedman: That makes a lot of sense.
Al Ries: So advertising,
Low Price Georgetown 11s With Big Discount, more and more, is not good for the new brands. What’s good for new brands? PR. You see, in PR you’re not speaking for the brand, it’s the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or CBS, NBC or ABC who says it’s terrific. So the third party endorsement through PR is the way to launch a new brand. Now that goes exactly against the thinking of management in America. Anytime anybody says, "Let’s launch a new brand,
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Websites For Jordan 11 Georgetown All High-Quality, "You’re right. You shouldn’t be doing that anyhow. You should be launching with PR." Our philosophy is PR first and advertising second. You only use advertising after the brand has become established.
I’m not saying that established brands shouldn’t do PR; sure they should. But believe me, there is such an opportunity in the PR business to launch brands. As you probably know from your own experience, in meetings to launch a brand and I’ve been in many of those and looked around there are no PR people. The ad agency is there, the marketing manager is there,
Mens Jordan 11 Georgetown Low For Cheap Authentic, the sales manager is there and I ask, "Where are the PR people?"
So the PR business has a long way to go. First, they’ve got to get in the room. They’ve got to find a way to break down the door to get in the room before the brand is launched. That’s an issue too, but the philosophy I recommend is very powerful: PR first, advertising second.
And the other implication of this is the PR people need to get involved in the strategy of the brand. That’s the biggest single hang up, because traditionally it’s the advertising agency that works with the client to develop the marketing strategy the "ultimate driving machine" words and not the PR agency. But, the PR agency should, in a sense, take over the brand launching part of it and work on how to verbalize and visualize the brand. I think more PR people should be interested in reading our books than advertising or marketing people because some very major companies could buy into the concept of PR first and advertising second.
It would create enormous business for PRs,
Where Can i Buy Jordan 11 Georgetown Low Cheap Sale, but more importantly it would make the function more important for the company. And nothing is as powerful in a company today, as a successful launch of a new brand. A new brand can double their business. The opportunity for a company’s expansion in many ways lies in the development of new brands.
A number of years ago when Apple came out, Richard Edelman, President and CEO of the world’s largest independent public relations firm, used to make speeches on this subject and Edelman’s business has gone through the roof. I can’t believe how large they’ve grown in the last ten years. There is an enormous potential in the PR business if you just do exactly what I’m talking about: establish the idea that the PR people should be the ones that are the outside consultants launching a new brand and not the advertising agencies.
Marsha Friedman: To your point about no PR people in that Board meeting discussing a brand launch; my experience is that there’s often a big misunderstanding by management as to the actual function of PR, and for that reason,
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Al RIES: Yes, but this is not a one sided thing. I think many in the PR industry don’t want to be responsible for the success or failure of a brand so they don’t really want to step out and say, "Hey, you should let us handle it." They would sometimes rather say, "Send us the ads and we’ll publicize the ads." That’s easy way out, right?
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