The Marketing of Noynoy, Villar and Gibo - parts 1 and 2

MarketingRx for Feb 05-10

 

"The Marketing of Noynoy, Manny and Gibo"  - Part 1

 

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

 

 

Q:  We are another NGO who is unlike the ones who have been asking you to apply your social marketing in analyzing the coming presidential election.  

 

First of all, we DO NOT believe marketing or social marketing should further confuse what's already a confusing political scenario preparing for a critical point in this nation's history.  We think calling this manipulative practice of marketing as social marketing won't absolve the practice of its Machiavellian character.

 

We say you are confusing the voting public by calling their coming voting behavior as "low involvement behavior."  How can you say that when you know that this coming election is all about this country's next six years as continuing misery or as misery reversal? Isn't it a fundamental truth in education that if you tell a child that he's useless, he will henceforth behave as if he's useless?  That's the same with voters.  Tell them this election is low involvement and they will so regard it. (Please keep out of politics and social science--just stay in marketing.) - Mr Confidential

 

A:  WE APPRECIATE YOUR frankness.  We should be just as frank to tell you that we cannot say the same about how "politically correct" you delivered them.  Allow us to respond to each of the two major points of your note.

 

We start with the easiest, namely, your equating marketing with social marketing.  Even such grant-giving global foundations from whom most high performing and more reputable NGOs obtain their funding support, have since more than 20 years ago recognized social marketing's insightful contributions.  In fact, most now require social and economic projects to integrate social marketing into their interventions. These are global foundations like those in Japan, U.S., Canada and Europe.  If this is unknown to you, then it's unfortunate that you have allowed your knowledge of marketing and social marketing to remain in the vintage of 50s and 60s.  A little updating will do your mindset some good and lessen your distrust and understandable indignation over marketing's checkered past.

 

              

Low involvement

Your second point challenges our inference that the voting behavior in this coming election is low involvement.  That conclusion draws from the survey data from both SWS and Pulse-Asia.  When probed as to why they will vote so-and-so candidate, most Class D (borderline poor) and Class E (extreme poor) voters say something like this one who was the more articulate of those interviewed: "Sa totoo lang, para sakin parepareho lang lahat yang mga kandidatong yang.  Simula pa ke Cory, wala namang kahit isang presidentena nakapag ahon samin ni kaunti sa kahirapan."  (Truly, for me these candidates are all the same.  Starting with Cory, not a single president has brought us even a little bit out of poverty.)   

 

Some of the voting poor had also been heard to say in answer to the question of how important to them is this coming election: "Ano ba naman ang gagawin namin sa darating na election?  Sa totoo lang, yan naman ay limang minuto sa isang araw sa anim na taon sa aming buhay na pagkatapos niya ay magkakalimutan na uli tayo."  (What do we have to do in this coming election?  In truth, that's just five minutes in one day within 6 years in our life, after which we're back to forgetting each other.)  Is this kind of attitude that you would count as correlated with high involvement?  

 

All these are said out of the past 20 or more years of experience of the vast population of the poor with what they saw our past 4 presidents had done (or rather had not done) for them and their poverty.  And remember that A.C. Nielsen estimates the poor to now account for 90% of our total nationwide population! 

 

You are probably correct in thinking that voting behavior among the poor was once high involvement.  That must have been during Cory's term.  But thereafter especially with the last two administrations, it had come to what our quoted verbatims from the interviewed poor implied.  For the great majority of the poor, voting in the coming election doesn't matter anymore.  This explains why before Cory died, all leading 4 to 5 presidential candidates were very close to one another in their respective shares of votes.

 

We are out of space, so get your copy of the Inquirer next Friday to read the conclusion and discover why Villar is catching up with Noynoy (and what Noynoy can do about this) and why Gibo's advertising is keeping him from advancing in the polls.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at drnedmarketingRx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net . God bless!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MarketingRx for Feb 12-010

 

"The Marketing of Noynoy, Manny and Gibo"  - Part 2

 

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

Many of us thought that after Cory died and when suddenly Noynoy out of nowhere registered a 50% share of votes, most voters' low involvement just as suddenly transformed into high involvement.  That was more out of a sense of hope that took over our more scientific reading of the survey statistics.

 

We were brought back to the hard reality of the poor voters as the literature on low involvement in consumer behavior research predicted.  Low involvement voters like low involvement consumers behave according to the dictates of what's on top-of-mind and/or what's on top-of-heart.  What they are aware of and what draws and holds their attention drives their purchase behavior or in the present discussion their voting intention behavior registered in the SWS and Pulse-Asia surveys as a candidate's share of votes. 

 

Explaining Villar's Rise

              And those are exactly the voter responses that Manny Villar's advertising concentrated on generating: voter top-of-mind awareness and top-of-heart attention-drawing and attention-holding among both borderline poor and extreme poor voters.  These quickly translated in the last survey into an increase of Villar's share of votes from 24% to 33% to last month's 35%.  That's not at all that far from Noynoy's slowly falling 44% share of votes and last month's 42% especially when you factor in the two ratios' respective margin of error.

 

Single-mindedness.Another notable characteristic of low involvement behavior is how it is influenced by "single-minded" message.  It is easily confused by a communication message with "multiple claims."  Just consider how single-mindedness is the very essence of Villar's advertisement.  Contrast that to the Noynoy TV ad promising more than half a dozen "evils" to fight against and ending with a promise never to steal and be corrupt.  To the upper and middle class (which according to the latest estimate from A.C.Nielsen makes up only 8% to 10% of total Philippine population) this may be a top priority election concern and issue.  But to the 90% poor, according to the SWS and Pulse-Asia surveys, this ranks as a low #7 priority election issue.  And you don't need space science to appreciate how Villar's recent use of Dolphy (an icon with the poor) is going to be a real knock-out.  Of course, we'll have to wait for this month's survey to confirm or disconfirm.  But in all these, which candidate do you think will resonate more with the vast majority of the voting poor and be their top-of-mind and top-of-heart presidential choice? 

 

Gibo, the pilot?

Gibo's advertising message and execution inside an airplane that he's piloting is even more alien and most likely alienating to the poverty voters.  How many percent of the poor had ever seen the inside of a plane or the inside of the plane's pilot cockpit?  Talk of the significance of having an ad with high identification with its target audience and you'll have to give a really low failing grade to Gibo's TV commercial.

         

     Our reading of low involvement in the poor voters' regard for their voting behavior in the coming election is not an opinion.  It's drawn from solid and valid survey based data.  It's your assumption that because for you "this coming election is all about this country's future," then it must be so with the rest of the voters in the country including the 90% poor.  Just because you yourself are a voter does not mean what is high involvement to you and your NGO is also high involvement to the poor.  Learn to acquire EQ (Empathy Quotient) for the poor and you'll become of more help to them and more understanding of those outside your more noble profession.

 

What to do now, Noynoy and Gibo?

              Please do not think that our analysis is an endorsement of Villar.  The same analysis benefits the other two candidates, Noynoy and Gibo if they are to ask:  "So what do we do now?"  To Noynoy our low involvement analysis says clearly: "Stop the bleeding of your share of votes.  Consider what the low-involvement concept prescribes for you especially in your advertisement.  Stop promising too many things.  Do a Villar and be single minded."  And to Gibo?  At this point, social marketing does not know what to tell him to do but it knows what to tell him he should not do.  Stop executing your TV commercials in a context that has low-identification value to the poor voters.

 

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at drnedmarketingRx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net . God bless!

How to market Noynoy Aquino for President in 2010

MarketingRx for October 2-09

Marketing "Noynoy for President"? - part 1

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

Q:  We work for an NGO advocating for change and for Noynoy in the coming 2010 election.  We read your column some 2 or 3 months ago saying that voters have a low involvement regard for the coming election and this is why the top 5 or 6 presidentiables have very close voting percentages.  To be frank, we disagreed and still do with your analysis and didn’t like at all what you predicted.  We were like the group who asked you the question in that column.  But we are different in that we believe many of the concepts about changing public behavior we found in your social marketing book. 

You wrote that column before the Noynoy phenomenon.  But now without the kind of Villar’s extra heavy ad campaign and without the other candidates’ shameless advertorial plugs, we’ve all seen how out of nowhere Noynoy grabbed the lead in the presidential race with an unbelievable 49% votes.  Surely, you can no longer say voters still have a low involvement regard for the coming election.  So what does your social marketing have to say now about our voters, our presidentiables that include Noynoy, and who will win in the coming election?

A:  You wrote an excellent brief note.  Thank you for your endorsement of the senior MR-er’s social marketing book.  Next, we’d like to go directly and respond to your questions. 

First, do voters no longer have a low involvement regard for the coming election? 

There are at least two important things to consider here.  The first of these is Noynoy’s 49% share of votes.  We probably can say that for those 49%, the low involvement attitude has been left probably in favor of the high at least for the present.  But as you probably still remember from your statistics, the flip side of that 49%  is the 51% who were not touched by Noynoy or by what happened to his Mom, Cory Aquino.  So the most we can say about the 49% statistic is that the playing field is now probably even between the low versus the high involvement voters.

This conclusion holds IF the 49% ratio represents a trend data.  But it is not a trend data.  It’s a single data point as of the date of that scientific and credible survey that did the reading.  To validly conclude about its voter behavior implication with regard to the likelihood of Noynoy’s winning the coming election, we need to see at least two more successive data points.  If that 49% is more or less maintained in the next two surveys, then it becomes reasonable to conclude that there’s a trend in favor of half the voter population sticking to Noynoy.  If, on the other hand, the next two surveys show an increase for each of these 2 surveys, then the trend is for the 49% to even increase further.  That will make Noynoy a stronger presidential candidate on the verge of becoming a dominant leading candidate.  Finally, if in the next 2 surveys, the 49% declines, then that 49% was no trend.  It was an “outlier” statistics representing a “surprise” or what author Nassim Taleb refers to as a “Black Swan” phenomenon that would, just as quickly as it appeared would just disappear or level off about the norm.

In all these 3 likelihoods, what’s of strategic significance is to understand the social force or forces underlying that 49%.  What made 49% of voters to suddenly want Noynoy for their president this coming election?  Without such an explanation, anyone’s intrepretation and recommendation are just as good as any other.         

That’s one social marketing answer to your question on who will win the coming election.  If we transform the question to relate specifically to Noynoy, we therefore ask: 

“Will Noynoy win the election?”  

Or translating the question to refer to your advocacy stand and resoluteness, the question becomes: “What will it take for Noynoy to win the election?”

The ideal would be for Noynoy to hold on to the 49% and if there should be a decline in this voting ratio, to arrest the decline to the lowest level of 30% or 34%.   Recall that Fidel Ramos won at a 24% share of votes.  That’s our benchline in this portion of the analysis.  Now, come May 2010, the final share of votes for any candidate will be determined first by the voters’ final voting decision and behavior.  But the other half in a candidate’s final share of votes is his or his party’s political machinery.  That other big factor is what we do not and cannot have from the survey. 

The political machinery includes, especially for the incumbent party, its capability and experience with a “hello-Garci” maneuver or many others of this type of vote hijacking.  Presumably, a 10% lead (i.e., 34% versus 24%) would represent too numerous a number of voters to hide under a “dagdag-bawas” (vote adding-vote deducting) manipulation.  So Noynoy can gain a decisive win with a low 34% or a high 49% SOV that he now commands.

Just how can your NGO and allies make this happen? Since we are out of space, we'll answer that question next Friday! 

Thanks for your questions. Keep sending them to drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net or text us at 0918-3386412. God bless! 

MarketingRx for October 9-09

Marketing "Noynoy for President"? - conclusion

By Dr Ned Roberto & Ardy Roberto

Here's a repeat of the question posed last week by an NGO advocating for change and "marketing" Noynoy for President in 2010. They ask:

Q:  We read your column some 2 or 3 months ago saying that voters have a low involvement regard for the coming election and this is why the top 5 or 6 presidentiables have very close voting percentages.  To be frank, we disagreed and still do with your analysis and didn’t like at all what you predicted....

(But) you wrote that column before the Noynoy phenomenon.  But now without the kind of Villar’s extra heavy ad campaign and without the other candidates’ shameless advertorial plugs, we’ve all seen how out of nowhere Noynoy grabbed the lead in the presidential race with an unbelievable 49% votes.  Surely, you can no longer say voters still have a low involvement regard for the coming election.  So what does your social marketing have to say now about our voters, our presidentiables that include Noynoy, and who will win in the coming election?

Here's the continuation and conclusion to our answer from last Friday. (For those who missed it, visit our blog at marketingrx.org)

Word of Mouth and stickiness

First, find out the social force or forces underlying Noynoy's 49% share of votes (SOV).  That reason or reasons make up the raw materials for crafting Noynoy’s campaign message.  Then, that message has to be spread and, more importantly, kept at top-of-mind  consciousness among the voter population.  How to effectively accomplish this is found today in the growing word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing literature.

WoM marketing shows that the spread of a message can be multiplied by its “conversation value.”   That’s the quality of a message that makes it to its audience “buzzable” or, if you will, “Boy-Abunda-ble.”  Its initial recipients will like to talk to others about the message. 

If talking about your message takes only one or two rounds, its spread and top-of-mind character will be short-lived.  It needs another pass-on quality.  That’s the quality of “stickiness” according to Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller book, The Tipping Point.  Message stickiness, comes from the appropriate and timely use of message source and message context. 

When a message source is a celebrity or a respected figure of authority, the message source gives the message an enhanced stickiness.  It is stickiness that gets the message to be passed on more than 2 or more rounds. 

The powerful message context, according to Gladwell, is controversy.  But using controversy is a double-edged sword because it has positive as well as negative consequences.

Controversy

Conversation value and stickiness find its ultimate and ingenious application in Mel Gibson’s pre-selling of the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”  Gibson did the following.  First, he spread the news that the Jewish communities were “mad at me because they said the movie made them look bad; it’s anti-semitic, they said.”  He then got emails to circulate in the Christian communities defending the movie.  Next, he somehow was able to get Entertainment Weekly to name the movie “the most controversial film of all times.”  This was followed by a movie review from the foremost movie critic Robert Ebert saying: “The full 10 minutes of flogging makes this the most violent film I have ever seen. … No level-minded parent should ever allow children to see this movie.”  That practically assured an eager children’s crowd for the movie.  Through all of these, the movie-going public talked about the movie and the media continued to do so as well.

So how did Gibson sustain the conversation value and stickiness of his WoM campaign for his movie?  He created a serial WoM “campaign” of sorts whose changing but unrelenting conversation value and stickiness held movie fans in suspended anticipation until the movie’s release and they all lined up to see it.  That’s the kind of WoM campaign that Noynoy requires for keeping his 49% SOV or for making sure its decline would stop at 34%.  His campaign message must have conversation value and stickness.  Then that message must be reformulated repeatedly and played in a serial schedule until election time.

We close by saying something about the social marketing model we applied above for shaping and directing voter behavior.  Among other things, the model versatility.  It can work for any other presidentiables.  An appropriate WoM campaign can be developed for the #2, #3 or even the #4 candidate aimed at matching and then excelling Noynoy’s SOV.  It’s a matter of having the necessary voter response and behavior data.  

Thanks for your questions. Keep sending them to drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net or text us at 0918-3386412. God bless! Our writer's fees for this and last week goes to Operation Blessing's medical mission for Typhoon Ondoy victims. Please support relief efforts for the victims of Typhoon Ondoy. God bless!  God bless!

FFF’s student dilemma: “What should I do about my (outdated) marketing professors without offending them …?”

MarketingRx for Jan 23-08
By Dr Ned Roberto with Ardy Roberto


We continue to answer the questions and try to allay the fears of student we’ve named FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future).

To recap, here’s part of his letter (for the benefit of those who missed this three weeks ago.)

Dear MarketingRx:

Graduation is fast approaching and I canʼt help but feel insecure of my knowledge and skills. Although I study in a reputable university, I am unfortunate to have outdated teachers whom despite having doctorate degrees stick strictly by the books. They lack in 1st hand experience which I think is highly instructive and crucial for their students.

Our typical classroom discussions range from reading out loud the latest copy of Kotler to embarrassing situations like when they are bombarded with questions they cannot answer convincingly. Another thing I find ironic is that they cannot relate what they teach to a Philippine setting. If not for your column, I would never have heard of marketing gurus such as Kumar or the concepts of customer insighting, communitization nor debunking the age-old belief that customer loyalty is the best business model.

Coming across marketing alumni, they have all expressed the same frustration: what we learn in school does not coincide with what is expected by the employers. This discrepancy highly alarms a lot of the marketing students. We have long expressed our observation that our curriculum needs to be streamlined with what is actually happening out there but it seems that these sentiments fall on deaf ears.

My grades are quite good and they have earned me a spot to be part of a team our department sends to compete in such competitions such as PANAʼs IMC and PMAʼs STRATMark. During these times, my team mates and I take it upon ourselves to learn the whole process and figure everything out on our own since our professors are not very helpful. We try to make the best of what is available but we still feel that it is inadequate. In fact as much as possible I try to attend seminars with key speakers and read up on marketing articles and books, but having no one to direct my questions to, I often get confused. I am now scared that in the future when I am employed I will find myself in situations where I am clueless.
In closing here are some of my questions:
what am I to do about my situation without offending my professors?
could you please give me an idea of how it is to be a professional marketer and what the industry is like?
what reading materials could you suggest to a newbie like me which could be very helpful?
what else should I do that could supplement my education and make my resume more attractive?

~ FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future)


A:

Last week, the junior MRx-er answered questions #3-4, now here’s your answer to question #1.

As your senior MRx-er, and having been a marketing professor for the past 30 years, I have witnessed and continue to see the kind of professors you reasonably find unacceptable. So I start by saying that it’s easy for me to empathize with your situation. Even after three decades in marketing education, I still find myself infuriated by the presence of these professors among us. But over the years, my regard for them has changed and there’s a difference in the way I regard them now. Today, I try to look at things also from their end.

That perspective came out of my co-authoring the 1989 social marketing book. Here’s what I learned from that project and they are lessons directly related to how I will answer your question.

Take the next step after complaining
First, if you look at marketing as a study of market and customer behavior, it’s easy to go from that step into saying that marketing is all about changing “undesirable” public behavior on the part of your target market or customer segment. That’s one way of looking at your situation. Ultimately, you want to change your marketing professors’ undesirable behavior, a behavior you find unbecoming of a responsible committed teacher. When we say “you,” we mean you the student as taking on the role of the change agent. At some point, you have to put a stop to complaining. For the period you’ve complained, that has served its purpose. It was good to complain because it let off the justifiable steam of unfairness inside you. But you know that the solution to your problem cannot be found in complaining. Continuing it can only add to your sense frustration and to no avail.

Launch a change campaign
So ending your frustration is in your hands. Instead, do something. Develop and launch a behavioral change campaign.

And your marketing professors are going to be your target market segment. But who’s going to be the primary target market (PTM) segment? Say, you have five guilty marketing professors who you can rank according to predisposition to behavior change like so:
1 = very resistant to change
2 = more resistant than predisposed
3 = neither resistant nor predisposed
4 = more predisposed than resistant
5 = very predisposed

So who should you target first? You can choose according to two opposing logics. One line of thinking says: “Choose the segment with the most need for change.” That would naturally be the one that’s “very resistant to change.” The other line of thinking says: “Choose the segment that’s most ready and therefore the easiest and probably the quickest to change.” That segment would be the “very predisposed.”

The most resistant will take time, maybe a very long time to change. It’s a segment that will therefore require the most investment in time and attention. On the other hand, the most predisposed will be quick to change and you can therefore use its conversion for leveraging on persuading the other segments to change as well. In your situation as a graduating student, this is the primary segment to go after. It’s a primary target market segment of one professor.

Positioning
After segmenting and after targeting comes the most pivotal step of “positioning.” Here, what does positioning mean? Positioning means persuading your primary target professor that it is to his personal and professorial advantage to leave his “bad” teaching behavior and replace it with the “good.” What’s in it for him to change behavior when he’s obviously satisfying some personal “needs” with what he’s doing now. Are the benefits from the behavior change going to be superior to what he’s enjoying now?

That in essence is the positioning diagnosis you have to undertake if you are to succeed in this behavior change mission that you have committed to pursue. Let’s see if we can help you push forward on this commitment.

The very first thing to do at this point is to understand why your target professor is teaching the way he does. Consumer behavior research says that a consumer, that is, your professor, does things because he’s satisfying some personal need or needs with his current teaching behavior. In other words, he won’t be doing what he’s doing if he’s not getting something out of it. So you should find out this. After finding out, your persuasion task becomes this. Convince him that the benefits from the new and changed behavior stand above and are superior to the benefits he’s getting from his current teaching behavior.

Consumer psychologists also tell us that people do things by “modeling” or according to the “social proof principle.” Since all other marketing professors are behaving this way, then everyone comes to view the behavior as correct or at least as not wrong. So search for the model that can reverse the social proof process.

There’s a third avenue of understanding. This is what consumer behaviorists call “perceived social normative pressure to change behavior.” In other words, if your target professor’s superiors, peers, student association, student alumni and other school stakeholders take a concerted effort to raise the bar of teaching performance, then there’s more likelihood of a behavior change. Of course, we have noted in your letter that you’ve already explored this avenue and you mentioned that it did not trigger that “social normative pressure to change behavior.” But it’s still worth reviewing that effort to see how it can stand fine tuning and sharpening.

“Teaching the teachers”
A fourth behavior change tactic worth mentioning is “empowerment.” In the situation you’re in, that translates to no less than teaching your target professor how to change behavior. The assumption that may seem unreasonable at first glance is that your target professor wants to change but just doesn’t know how to change. There’s no issue here about motivation to change behavior. The question is much more mundane and practical. It’s a matter of knowing the technique, the skill for changing behavior. We’re saying that our target professor wants to change but he just does not have the step-by-step knowhow to effect the change in behavior. Many of us would immediately say: “How can that be true with professors? These are intelligent professors with Ph.Ds after their names.” If you just stop and reflect for a moment, you may come to realize that teachers learn the content, the “what” of their disciplines. Practicing the what, that is, the “how” is often not encompasses in that training and even when it is, whatever learning happens is still all up in the air. Most teachers especially those who are young find it hard to practice what they preach.

Question: Which of these behavior change strategies do you adopt for your target professor?

A social marketer would say try all that’s good in each of them. Be eclectic. I’m conscious that my own “purist” behavioral science colleagues and friends would be ready to pounce of that prescription and call it “opportunistic” because being eclectic is to them the euphemism for being opportunistically Machiavellian. But my own experience with eclecticism over the years has been responsible for consequentially raising the likelihood of success and minimizing the risk of failure of almost all my consulting projects. It is in that spirit of sharing this experience that I write the prescription.


A final word. In my seminars, I am often asked by some well-meaning young marketing managers what they should do with their own bosses who behave just like FFF’s marketing professors. They find their bosses outdated in their command of marketing. If they have become just like FFF’s marketing professors, then our diagnosis and prescription should in their basic content and structure apply.

We’ll end with this advice from a reader named Carlo to be “patient.”

“Over the years, the basics of marketing haven't changed much. That's
what you need to learn in school. The Theory. What you need to learn
from your professors is how they were able to cope with the problems
of their times. Your professors may not be able to cope with current
marketing situations now if they have not updated themselves,
especially if they are not IT savvy and have not considered the new
forms marketing that are evolving such as targeted online marketing,
the social networks and other digital marketing phenomenon.

Nevertheless, you are expected to use your professor's experience and
draw an analogy on how to use this to your era. That's where your
creativity comes in handy as a marketing professional. Don't rush.
You'll get there. Unfortunately, they can not teach 'experience' in
school. Carlo - COBOL.RADIUS@GMAIL.COM

More advice and replies to FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future) continue to come in. We’ll close this series next week with advice from MarketingRx and other readers on FFF’s question on Working in the Marketing Industry and Expectations.

Keep your questions and commentscoming. Send them to us at MarketingRx@pldtDSL.net or post them on www.marketingrx.org or text us at 0919-314-5412. God bless!