MarketingInsideOut.com

Earlier this week PepsiCo starting pouring money into their latest brand launch — Diet Pepsi Max. As much as $55 million will be spent launching this brand geared to men 25 to 34 who like the buzz of drinks like Mountain Dew, but are starting to become concerned about their weight.

Targeted to desk jockeys battling the midday blahs, it’s being positioned as a diet energy drink to rouse men out of the 2pm slump. Their goal is to try and achieve a share of 3% to 5%, which would be pretty impressive if they can do it — but I would think that’s going to be an uphill battle. As far as I know, no one in the cola category has cracked the code on how to really appeal to men with diet drinks.

It seems like a tough challenge on two fronts — the concept of a diet soda to men and against other well-established, entrenched energy drinks. But at least PepsiCo is putting some big bucks behind it.

Pepsi’s challenge is unlike the pretty easy and logical product extension Coke did with Diet Coke Plus (calorie-free with added vitamins and minerals) in March. In that case, the prevailing mindset of the female drinker is “I’m already drinking a ton Diet Coke every day anyway, I might as well get something out of it.”

Whereas Diet Coke Plus could cannibalize a good share of Diet Coke business, it’s less likely Diet Pepsi Max, if they manage to truly resonate with men, will cannibalize the traditional Diet Pepsi share (which I would assume is also largely female).

I bought one tonight and to me…it tastes like Diet Pepsi and didn’t do much for me. But given that I drink at least one pot of coffee every morning and almost always have a glass of ice tea at hand after noon, I’d suspect I have a constant caffeine high anyway and wouldn’t notice any uptick.

They’ve stood (or sat) in line for hours. All across the Country. Some for more than 24 hours. All to be among the first to buy the iPhones that went on sale tonight at 6pm at Apple stores around the country.

It’s mind boggling to see the hype created over this product. I don’t remember ever seeing this much press or hearing this much buzz over any product before. Granted, it’s a really cool looking smart phone with a cutting-edge, touchscreen interface that can connect with WiFi’s, but it’s core function is a phone — (a $500 phone) and it’s exclusive to one provider.

But that is not slowing demand or desire in the least. And if I wasn’t locked in for the next 21 months with Sprint and if I hadn’t recently purchased a Treo, I would be in line right now. In fact, as I’m writing this I’m still trying to figure out a way that I can justify buying one and explaining to my husband why it was absolutely critical that I have one. So far, I haven’t come up with a good angle. And I’d suspect by morning, the first production batch will be sold out.

The demand and pure lust created for this product is a real tribute to the advantages of building such a loyal following that they become “brand evangelists.” Even if the iPhone only has a small share of the vast market, it will have an amazing heart share and people standing in line again when the next version comes out.

Today while reading the story about Yahoo buying Rivals.com, I found myself saying out loud “you got that right” (and I was alone in my office at the time) to the story comment about how, for Yahoo, sports fans are among the most passionate of fans. We are certainly experiencing that right now.

You see, we work with with the local organizating committee for the NCAA Men’s College World Series and one of the many things we manage for this event is the official web site for the event, CWSomaha.com.

To make an event like this happen there are a million moving parts with a zillion details and all of that has to be boiled down and presented on the web site to make hundreds of thousands fans aware of what is happening and keep them up-to-the-minute on event changes (like announcing the need for a tie breaker game and how to get tickets — late last night after North Carolina beat Rice).

It’s a 24/7 job for about 12 straight days — from opening celebration on June 14 until the final best of three championship game is played on with June 24th or 25th. In addition to creating, updating and managing the web site we also are the webmaster and deal with the thousands of emails that pour in from fans during the course of the series.

It’s a fantastic (and instant) feedback loop. Some fans have questions, some have tips, some want to share stories, some have requests or suggestions, some point out errors or confusing information. And we try our best to answer ever single email personally and to incorporate as many suggestions and changes as possible and quickly.

It’s because of the passionate fans that we keep getting better and better and keep pushing to improve and refine everything to make the fan experience the best it can be. This constant feedback cycle is incredible and keeps everyone on their toes, because there is nothing like a die-hard college baseball fan rooting for their team that is in the Series for the very first time.

P.S. It’s a repeat! North Carolina will again play defending champion Oregon State in only the second finals rematch in the CWS’ 61-year history. Arizona State and Southern California met in 1972 and 1973.

The introduction video to Apple’s WWDC 2007 this week with “PC” posing as Steve Jobs shutting down Apple. You can watch the entire Jobs keynote here.  I really like the new “stacks” feature (it’s about about 19 minutes in).

Interesting way to get a selling proposition across.

Most of us have had some not-so-great experiences trying to get an answer or resolve a problem through a customer call center. Whether dealing with your bank to clear up a problem, a cell phone company to change a plan or any number of places that are supposed to troubleshoot, being put in the queue is a fact of life. Sometimes even getting a human is a challenge (I’ve posted on that subject before).

There are about 50,000 call centers in the US alone. And many more thousands offshore. Competition is fierce, and a single bad experience with a company in any channel can lead to defection from a company. And rarely do defectors leave quietly. They tend to tell friends. They blog. They make themselves heard. Which is easier today than ever.

The fact is that a customer call center is a critical point of engagement for customers. It can make or break a relationship. Most companies know intuitively how important their call center interactions are, but they aren’t sure what the satisfaction drivers are.

Today an article regarding a new study by CFI Group on call center performance indices caught my eye because it gets at some of the key drivers that cause either pleasure or pain and ultimately determine satisfaction levels. CFI studied six industries: Banking, Cable and Satellite TV, Catalog Retail, Cellular Phone Service, Insurance, Personal Computer and reported on how they did and what factors drive satisfaction.

Here’s a few points I found interesting in the study:

• The most crucial factor contributing to satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and positive word-of mouth is not about how well you were treated during the call, but whether or not the CSR is able to resolve the caller’s issue. Unfortunately, 18% of customers do not have their issue resolved. The importance of this one factor is astounding. Customers who resolve their issue have satisfaction scores 46 points higher than those who do not. Furthermore, those who do not have their issue resolved are eight times more likely to defect.
• On average, about two-fifths (38%) of the respondents say they tried to reach the company first through a means other than the call center. Eighty-five percent of callers who try another method first try the company’s website, which fails to meet their needs, forcing them to try another channel to resolve their issue.
• Call center executives need to take a hard look at their training and monitoring programs to make sure that CSRs have the tools they need to answer the questions they are getting. And the bar is only getting higher as customers migrate to the web. If the “easy” questions are answered on the web, it leaves the more difficult issues for the CSRs to tackle.
• Not every issue can be addressed via the web, and one of the clear takeaways from this research is that improving the quality of the online channel could defer hundreds of thousands of unnecessary calls from the costly contact center channel. Contact centers help with resolving issues that can’t be resolved on the web. They should serve as a continuous feedback loop to the web operation. There can an should be processes in place to make enhancements to the website based on what the CSRs in the call center hear.

Must have been pretty costly, but it is a pretty cool idea. What they did was decorate a series of stalls in public restrooms in places like sports stadiums and shopping malls to look like a bathroom at home. On the back of each stall door was a trial pack of Kleenex Flushable Fresh Wipes with the line “Feel more at home wherever you go”.

Not only a good use of the medium (being the toliet stalls) but users had to appreciate the spiffier surroundings.

Agency: JWT, Sydney, Australia

Via Ads of the World

Photo via guiabuscadores.com

Beware the black van with panoramic cameras or you could end up in some mashup for all to see like this one.

Google’s new addition of street view to Google Maps adds a whole new dimension by weaving photographs into seamless panoramas. Google used a fleet of vans equipped with special cameras to amass 360-degree imagery of major US cities during the past several months and said it planned to add more urban areas to the Street View menu.

“With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans,” Google said on its website.

But some privacy advocates are accusing Google of breaking its “Don’t be Evil” code.

With street view you can see pictures of men urinating street side, college girls in skimpy swimsuits sunbathing near Stanford University, a man climbing a home’s security gate, and people going into a pornography shop. One couple can be seen necking on a sidewalk while another couple gets “busy” on a bus stop bench.

“Mom, Mom! It’s not right!” wailed Paris as she was led away to the side door and the waiting transportation to take her back to the jail she was released from yesterday for a “medical condition”.

Oh yeah…sure… a “medical condition”.

To which I say…yes, Paris it’s right. That’s what happens to spoiled kids who think they are exempt from the rules the rest of us abide by. Even my 15 year old understands there are consequences for her actions. As the saying goes: don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

Deal with it…Learn from it.

(I know this post may seem to have little to do with marketing directly, but her release peeved me yesterday and I guess you could say it’s a lesson in a brand [the one she created for herself] paying the price for arrogance.)

It’s amazing to me what drivel appears on TV anymore.

Tonight I find my husband watching some show where “supposedly” grown adults are playing pirates in a survivor-meets-big-brother type of reality show (it’s even running in Survivors’ time slot). Hunting and splitting booty.

And of course someone will get voted off the boat — that’s the way these shows work — to keep the scheming and back stabbing at high drama levels. Dumped at high sea I hope. What the hell? Where do they come up with this crap?

According to the web site this show is about:

“Join 16 modern-day pirates as they embark on a high seas adventure around the Caribbean island of Dominica in search of hidden treasure that will total $1 million. Over the course of 33 days, the pirates will live aboard a massive 179-foot pirate ship.

Each week, these buccaneers will go on extraordinary expeditions and decipher clues along the way. Gold coins - real money that the pirates can take with them beyond the show - will be awarded after each treasure hunt, but only to some.”

Reality my ass!