Influential Marketing Blog

I Like You, But Not That Way: How Retailers Lose & Win Back Customers

"3D Catalog" is a phrase you will see in a few articles about the retail industry these days. Unfortunately, it's not a cool new interactive augmented reality thing. This is a term that describes the fears of many real life retailers who are afraid of becoming a place where consumers just go to touch and feel products that they will eventually buy from Amazon or another discounted online store. There are plenty of reasons why this is an understandable fear.

Right now the most viewed and popular blog post on Forbes.com is titled "Why Best Buy Is Going Out Of Business, Gradually." In it, author Larry Downes argues that Best Buy is managing to deliver on none of the things like knowledgeable staff or better showrooms which could make them a destination worth visiting. Instead, he argues, it is a retailer of last resort or a place where you just go to see products that you will eventually buy elsewhere.

Borders Books went into bankruptcy over the past year, and one of the contributing factors was they had more browsers than buyers walking through their stores. This past Black Friday retail season, online sales were a higher overall percentage of consumer spending than ever before - and this has been the trend for the last several years.

The whole situation might remind you of a mismatched relationship, where one person just wants to be friends while the other wants more than that.  Those situations never end well. Best Buy wants to marry your wallet, but instead they are getting dumped after a one night stand. It is a sad story, with some fairly clear reasons for why it happens over and over:

1. There is better interactive product information online - with all of the online product demos, 3D product shots and direct information from manufacturers - you can often get the best information about particular products and the ability to comparison shop online.
2. Online reviews are highly influential - there is a reason that more than 80% of all consumers read online reviews before making purchase decisions. We trust in the opinions of others, even if we don't know them personally - and these online reviews are a huge factor in closing a sale, or losing a customer.
3. Retailers can't match lower prices available online - the most logical and common argument is that you can just get any product for cheaper online because the online retailers have much lower overhead to cover because of not having a physical store.

So how can retailers survive this pressure and avoid becoming nothing more than a real life catalogs fueling the sales of their online rivals? It comes down to understanding the three areas where a real life presence still matters, and trying to sit at the intersection of all three. When I think about the real life stores that I have gone to in order to buy a product that I could have purchased online, it was for one of three reasons:

1. Ease - the store was close to me, or the product was large (like a snow blower) and therefore the online channel was too risky or inconvenient and I went to my local store instead.
2. Relationship - I had a personal relationship with a person at my local store and therefore had built up trust in them and the experience that they offered me.  As a result, I continued to go there despite having other options to purchase online.
3. Expertise - In some cases, you just need to speak to someone who knows what they are talking about. Earlier this year when I went to buy a new tent and sleeping bag for a camping trip with my son, I went into the local store to speak to someone who knew our area and could provide useful advice on what to get.

Until retailers are able to find the right way to focus on combining these three together into an experience worth having and sharing, they will continue to lose out to the speedier and always available retailers online.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

How Australia Uses Social Media To Celebrate Immigrant Experiences

Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get from their home countries to Australia is certainly part of the reason - and the long history of violence against the native aboriginal people (much like the US history with the Native Americans) has led to drastically reduced native population.

Until just the last few decades, Australia was a place which also held onto a fairly racist immigration policy - legislating first against all immigrants, then against Southern Europeans (such as Greeks and Italians), and then against all others until finally in 1973 the country finally adopted the same open immigration policy as most other developed countries of the time.  Slowly, the country began to actively court people from all cultures to come to Australia. When I lived there from 1998 to 2003, I remember being struck by how invested the government was in getting people to join the culture and become Australian. They even had television ads where the call to action was "become a citizen."

Last year, the Australian TV channel SBS launched an interesting documentary series online designed to celebrate one sector of the immigrant experience - people who had come from Africa and built their lives in Australia. Told with an interactive website featuring videos of real people - the campaign offered an inside look at the success stories and real lives of African immigrants in Australia.

It is exactly the kind of campaign that every country should do more of. The immigrant experience is a critical part of the success of many countries, and recently it seems to be under a sort of undue scrutiny from many cultures as reactions to fundamentalist groups, potential terrorism and misguided fear mongering have led to a new rise in popularity for isolationism.

Preventing immigration is not the solution. Australia may have been one of the slowest countries in the world to realize the value of an open immigration policy - but now they celebrate it with campaigns like this one. Let's hope other developed countries can follow their example.

Can Coke Start A Trend To Make Inspiration A Form Of Co-Creation?

What if you could join your favourite band in studio to record their next single? For many, this is just a moment to dream of - but last month Coca-Cola partnered with the rock band Maroon 5 to do exactly that in a social experiment to create a new song in 24 hours. Fans could watch a live stream of the band working on a new song in the studio and contribute to the brainstorming process in real time via a Twitter screen that was broadcast live to the band. Check out the recap video below:



The end result was a single called "Is There Anybody Out There?" that is available for a free download from Coke. Aside from being an amazingly creative campaign idea, this could spark more brands to consider a new form of co-creation where consumers are invited not to create content themselves, but to be the spark for professionals to create content. In a sense, this is no different than real life where artists often take their inspiration from their fans.

Though Coke's efforts have cause some to raise valid criticism about whether the campaign can be considered all that successful since the views and audience seems small by Coke standards, sometimes the most forward thinking ideas aren't the ones which go viral right away. To me, the real power of this campaign is that it imagines a world where brands can help connect people with the artists they love in a way that empowers them to contribute to what the artists are creating.

Inspiration as a form of co-creation is not just a great marketing concept, but one which offers musicians and even filmmakers a new way to engage their audience on a deeper level and also get better ideas and inspiration to make their work better.  The only downside is that it leaves a lot of people to thank from the Grammy/Oscars stage ...

CBS Wants To Kill Demographics, Marketers Should Help

"There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign."

You would expect a conclusion like that to come at a consumer rights type of event. Perhaps even at a social media event with marketers who are fighting the status quo and encouraging others to think differently. But when this point of view comes from CBS Corporation's Chief Research Officer David Poltrack - it is downright revolutionary. At an event earlier this month, Poltrack presented findings from new research that he conducted along with Neilsen that challenges some very long held assumptions about not only TV advertising, but about advertising and marketing itself.

Among the conclusions the report shared - according to an article in AdAge:

• "Reliance on the 18 to 49 demographic is hazardous to all media and marketers, partly because it doesn't strongly correlate with purchases and partly because it's declining fast."
• "A growing amount of data that matches audience measurement with purchase information shows that using demographics to target commercials is 'essentially invalid,' Poltrack said, 'resulting in a misallocation of television advertising investments.'"

It has long been a dirty little secret in marketing that the targeting that is used throughout much of media buying is based on information that is readily available instead of information that is most important. As technology starts to bridge the gap and offer better insights into consumer behaviours, attitudes and intentions - why should the industry still rely on old and outdated demographics to determine where and how they spend on media?

Apart from a few situations (like targeting 18-19 year olds because you know many of them are preparing to head off to college, for example) age based demographics ARE completely useless. Social media and digital advertising has already been leading the way with methods for buying media that are inherently more focused on behaviour (keyword text advertising) or attitudes (targeting by interests on Facebook). It's about time that marketers had similar options for a more sophisticated way to target who they want to reach through other mediums such as TV.

The temptation from the industry may be to dismiss this research from CBS as being self-serving or flawed in some way. The smart marketers will get behind it immediately. Ultimately we all should.

How Levi's Rear View Girls Video Went Sneakily Viral

About two weeks ago, Levi's creative team in Australia hatched what seemed like a brilliant campaign stunt idea to promote the Levi's Curve ID jeans for women. They hired two models from New Zealand, equipped them with an "ass cam" that would tape people watching them on the street and sent them out in LA to just walk around. Predictably, they did end up capturing men and women checking out their asses [link to the video below as posted on Creativity Magazine's website, in case the video below gets removed] - the whole thing went viral on YouTube and in less than two weeks it rose to more than 7 million views.

The reviews of the video ranged from early admiration to later criticism when it was revealed that Levi's was behind the video ... a fact that is clearly missing from the video itself. Mary Elizabeth Williams, a staff writer for Salon had a particularly entertaining article about it:

"Levi's may yet pull some genius, sales-inspiring sequel out of its shapely butt here, but right now, the ass cam seems a grand example of how garnering millions of page views does not in and of itself constitute an effective advertising campaign. Instead, it just looks like a sneaky trick, one whose message boils down to "If you wear our pants, ugly guys dressed up like Jesus will stare at your caboose." Got it, Levi's. Message received. You're a bunch of asses."

The story doesn't end there, however. As of right now, the "rear view girls" have been taken off of YouTube ... probably because it features lots of people who are recognizable and were taped without their knowledge looking pretty foolish (especially that lady on the escalator). Ultimately, this will likely end up just a huge missed opportunity for Levi's. The concept of an ass-cam capturing stares to sell a pair of jeans that make your ass look great isn't a bad concept.

In this case, it was the sneaky integration of the brand that ultimately undermined a great creative concept. The fix would have been simple ... for Levi's to take credit for the campaign in the "behind the scenes" video that they also produced.



A great mystery needs to have a great reveal attached to it. When we find out the butler did it in a mystery novel, we are satisfied. Hiding that fact makes us all feel like we've been tricked, and as Williams said, just makes the people behind the whole thing look like asses.

7 Predictions For How Healthcare & Our World Will Evolve By 2020

Most trend predictions that forecast beyond a year into the future are doomed to inaccuracy simply because of the pace of change and unpredictability of innovation. The rightfully skeptic among us are therefore likely to condemn a report that promises to predict how the world might look in 2020 as a work of optimistic fiction at best, and an exercise overstretched vanity at worst. That was the lens I brought to a report that some colleagues of mine at Ogilvy CommonHealth recently shared with me called 202020 VISION, a digital-health report outlining 20 scenarios of what digitally driven healthcare might look like in 2020. The report is surprisingly brilliant.

Reading through the scenarios, it was easy to imagine a distant future where technology and healthcare finally begin to work together to create a better world of care for us all. Though we cannot share the full report here (see the bottom of this post for details on how to get the full report), this post highlights seven of the most powerful ideas from the report along with some potential implications for anyone in marketing and communications:

1. Exhaustive Behavioural Targeting Transforms Health Messaging.

In a world where nearly everything will become measurable, marketers will have exhaustive behavioural information about each of us, including our lifestyle behaviours, or how often we walk past an enabled sign will all be stored with the purpose of targeting more messages to each of us. This higher level of behavioural targeting will require regulation to prevent abuse, but it will also create the ability to create targeted offers to customers in real time that are based on that customers individual behaviour.

 

2. "Auto-Triage" Aids More Efficient Care.

In an emergency room environment, significant time is wasted trying to identify where a patient needs to go and what type of treatment they require. In 2020 this information will be handled by computers and automated based on data input into the system in the field by ambulance and emergency teams. Electronic medical records will be sent in advance of a patient, and this automated system will allow patients to be prioritized and seen more efficiently and quickly by doctors.

3. Supermarkets Become Centers For Healthcare.

Local supermarkets are already hubs for everything from groceries to pharmacies to banks to gas stations. In the imagined supermarket of the future, the food items we buy will have assigned "health points" and these points will be used to incentivize people towards healthier food choices. Combined with smart data delivered through home appliances such as connected fridges, supermarkets will be able to make real time suggestions on products to buy based on what we already have in our fridge at home.

4. Personalized Videos Bring Diseases To Life.

A big challenge for current healthcare professionals is to convey the gravity of a disease condition to patients. Unless patients feel this urgency, they don't change behaviours. By 2020, personalized video will enable healthcare professionals to equip newly diagnosed or non-compliant patients with customized videos that show patients like them dealing with similar conditions. Seeing the potential impact of not taking care of themselves through these computer generated videos will help patients make the necessary lifestyle changes, and stick to them.

5. Health Tourism Becomes Mainstream.

What is currently the realm of Hollywood stars and the wealthy will become mainstream by 2020. Health or Medical Tourism will no longer be a choice simply made based on the promise of getting cut rate medical care, but a preferable alternative because of the combination of quality of care, ability to focus on a recovery and generally more pleasant resort-like conditions at many health tourism locations that will allow patients to recover faster. Earlier detection of conditions will allow planning for this type of travel to happen much more frequently as well.

6. Gaming Connects Patients & Changes Lifestyles.

The power of gaming to transform medical care is already being explored in many different ways. The future of gaming will include the ability to create entire communities around specific disease conditions where the end goal of adherence to medication or lifestyle changes will be enabled by connecting experienced patients with the newly diagnosed in a gaming environment and allow them to support one another. Gaming will also enable the development of real skills as part of rehab programs and dexterity exercises. The reward systems built into gaming will also incentivize patients to take positive actions for their own health.

7. Communication Enabled Through The Power Of The Mind.

The terminally ill or severly handicapped struggle with the most basic of communications, yet by 2020 the growing field of brain-computer interfaces will have progressed to a level where these patients can communicate with others via their thoughts. This will enable them to significantly improve their quality of life, let the terminally ill "get their affairs in order" and otherwise transform long term patient care environments.

How To Get This Report:

If you'd like to see the full report, send an email to 202020@ogilvy.com to request a copy and mention that you read about the report on this blog. Read the official release about the 202020 VISION report on the Ogilvy site.

Disclaimer - This report was written by a team of people from Ogilvy CommonHealth, a division of Ogilvy. Though I work at Ogilvy and do often work with the CommonHealth team, I did not contribute to the creation of this report, nor do I mean to take any credit for the research and thinking behind it. My opinion of this report is based solely on reading it after its publication and being inspired by the ideas contained in it. I have not been incentivized or asked to write this review by anyone else.

5 Crowdsourced Consumer Trends To Watch In 2011

Almost anyone you meet in marketing will usually be a fan of getting their data and insights about major trends in consumer behaviour from research reports. After all, we generally pay a lot of money for them, and (ironically) many of the most authoritative are BRANDED either by a research organization, or by an authoritative institution such as a renowned business school. To some degree, this is valuable and much needed ... since anyone can publish the results of any unscientific poll or survey done hastily on Twitter and more weight to the "data" produced than they should. Yet you don't need an MBA in analytics to have a voice in spotting hot trends.

For those of you who actively read and digest information about the world around you - Trendhunter.com has a home for your thoughts. Whether you happen to write your own blog or prefer to remain a participant instead of a creator, the site has built a platform for what they call "Crowdsourced Consumer Insight." Last week they released a sneak peek at their 2011 Trend Report which takes individual examples of interesting trends and applies a filter to identify some top level trends that they may point towards. 

The team at TrendHunter was kind enough to share an exclusive link to a sample of the report with the TOP 20 TRENDS and lots of great insights for FREE and you can get the 35 page report right here.

As I read it this weekend, there were a few trends in particular that caught my eye and will definitely be useful for me in the coming months as I help several of our clients with building and executing their own marketing strategies for 2011. Here are a few standouts:

1. Charitable Deviance. As I read this report about how charitable organizations are using more attention grabbing methods to capture attention, I thought of the recent Digital Death campaign that I profiled on this blog. Getting people to pay attention to world changing ideas is (and has always been) a marketing challenge. Finding a solution to these challenges through creativity is something every marketer should find some time in the new year to participate in ... even if it lands outside of your day job.
2. Brand Reversion. I have a live example of this in my own home, as my six year old son has become a huge fan of He-man - an animated series that was popular when I was a kid in the late 80s. This larger trend is about the return of the old, in many categories from fashion to art. Nostalgia will always be a part of us, but as social tools allow us to reconnect with our pasts in ways such as rediscovering lost grade school friends and purchasing those toys we used to play with on eBay - this trend will only continue to rise. Super Mario Brothers anyone?
3. Next Besting. One of the more brilliant terms to come out of TrendHunter back in 2008 was this term which described the consumer behaviour of finding slightly cheaper, but still good alternatives. Being number 1, in this world, can be a big liability because consumers may be more willing to trade down for your next best competitor. I agree with the report's assessment that this trend is on the rise again and will likely show no signs of slowing down in 2011.
4. Democratic Selling. A term that they assign to the process of consumers voting for products to get made - I think this trend speaks to something that is even larger, beyond selling to donations, or content creation, or even advertising. Consumer creation or co-creation as it is often called is extending into unexpected areas and I think we will continue to be surprised each time it creeps into a new area of the world we didn't expect.
5. Discreet Consumerism. I have a theory about this particular one in the sample report, and why it is placed last. If you happen to work in marketing, you will probably have the same reaction I had right after you read this trend ... that you need to get the rest of the report. Discreet Consumerism speaks to the idea that there may be a backlash growing against brands and our overly branded world. This is something I have been thinking about for some time as well, and the reason for this rebellion comes down to distrust. The challenge for marketing is how to regain that trust without relying to gimmicks or luck to do it.

To download the full 35 page PDF sample report, use this exclusive link for Influential Marketing Blog Readers. Also, stay tuned as the rest of this week I will be exploring a few other interesting trends not included on that report which I think will be worth watching in 2011.

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.

A Marketing Lesson From Michael Jackson's This Is It Film

Deconstruction is a powerful idea. All it means is taking an experience or something real and breaking it down into its individual components. Deconstructing helps you to understand something. Deconstructing tells a story. I remember the first time I saw the movie Amadeus, the Oscar winning dramatization of the life of Mozart, there was one scene that stayed with me. It was the composer Salieri describing (and deconstructing) the music of Mozart:

It helped me to understand classical music in a way I had never thought about. This weekend, as I watched the memorial documentary of Michael Jackson's planned concert tour, This Is It, I thought about that same feeling. The moment of watching something that was deconstructing a vision and a story that I hadn't quite realized the significance of until that moment. This Is It has been getting rave reviews since coming out last week and has already crossed the $100 million mark. Some are already anticipating that it is Oscar-worthy. Here's the preview, in case you haven't seen or heard about it:

What made the film most powerful for me was one moment when Michael was working with his band and rehearsing the length of a pause in a song - encouraging them to "let it simmer." Then the music was brought together with the filmed visuals that were done on a green screen and you saw how the pieces interacted. The film deconstructed the concert that never was, and gave you a vision of what it would have been.

It would be easy to write a marketing post about how this movie has been promoted and perhaps even criticize how it is turning Michael Jackson's death into a venue for moneymaking. The most powerful marketing idea I will take away from the film and experience, however, is the real power of deconstructing an experience to give people an inside look and emotional attachment to it. Deconstruction helped me understand the power of classical music, and the genius of Michael Jackson. The same concept could work equally well for deconstructing a cause such as the fight against Pneumonia and World Pneumonia Day, or sharing the vision behind an inspired marketing campaign. How could deconstruction help your marketing?