Passionland

Is this going to be our destination for 3rd anniversary?

one of the most recommended nude destination in the world - Sea Mountain Resort - Nude Hotel & Spa resides in Southern California.

from marketing point of view, it is very segmented and of course those segments dare to spend a lot in this hotel and spa. Everything is nude, everyone is nude. Unfortunately, it is only for couples and women. So alone men, please do not go there

quite creative and full of “passion”

or passionland is going to adopt this concept? will be first in Indonesia hehehe

Hi Octokers….. how’s your passion engine

just finished our workshop with Eleanor and still seeing some bosses’re discussing one of our clients marketing communication programs.

Today’s session was provoking. It starts from the theme “Creativity” and from all of those slides, what I remember most from Eleanor is once she said about “Learn & Unlearn”

To become creative, we should be able to unlearn what we have been experiencing with. In a nutsheel, most of the times when we know something or we’ve been handle a client too long, we feel that we know more than others. In fact, it can be devastating as we don’t want to accept other people ideas. Knowing something too detail makes us feel resistance to “not-invented-here ideas”

The key point from Eleanor is creativity starts from the ability to accept ideas from someone that do not understand what we are handling. The totally new new fresh ideas would come up.

It reminds me of what have been said by Gary Hamel & CK Prahalad in their fascinating book “Competing for The Future”. They clearly mentioned that to survive in the future competition, we should learn to forget. Learning to forget implies the passion to accept new ideas that sound silly, disgusting and “can’t-do ideas”

The key point is a creative guy should be able to learn new things, relearn the latest things and most important is unlearn old things. By learning new things will keep us updated. Relearn makes us stay competitive. Unlearn kills the resistance level

so.. make sure you always stay at Octovate to learn, relearn and unlearn

Most of us do believe that this is the era of consumer so-called as user-generated, consumer-generated and other sexy buzzword.

Starting from marketing communication world of which lot of advertisers shift their focus to consumer-generated ads, now it moves to company ownership. Most of us do aware that the most valuable football club currently is Manchester United with its white-hair Alex Ferguson as the manager

in UK, My Football Club introduced for the first time in history, fans have the opportunity to buy and take the control of a professional football club. Fans can choose which players should in and out.

Recently, they just bought Ebbsfleet United FC in UK — not so well-known club– but in fact it starts to show us the new new concept of football club ownership. One thing that matter most is the power of consumers! they will be the one who control companies and brands!!!

please guy…. don’t punish me. I just quote this article from The Independent UK. Blame them, not me ;)

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
Sumardy

Making ads from your employees
Staff can be effective marketers of a brand, wearing T-shirts or even being tattooed with the company logo. Marketing expert Nicholas Ind reports on a strange trend

Published: 05 November 2007
I once interviewed the chief storyteller for Nike, who was in Europe to tell stories about the heritage and culture of the company to new employees. We spent an afternoon in a hotel lounge in Amsterdam and at the end of the interview he stood up, put his leg on the table and started rolling up his trousers. I started to wonder what was going to happen next. A Masonic handshake? Some strange Nike ritual? But, no, what he wanted to show me was a swoosh (tick) tattoo on his calf.

Of course, there are stories about Harley-Davidson owners having logos tattooed on their bodies, but it’s quite something else to have your employer’s logo. In these days of employment mobility (the average job tenure is now just over 2 years in the UK) most people would end up looking like a Yakuza gangster or Robbie Williams. Maybe the difference with Nike’s storyteller was that he was employee number 18 in the company and had spent his life working there.

Most companies would like their employees to be committed enthusiasts – not because of some sense of welfare, but because loyal employees are more productive and there are considerable costs attached to hiring and developing new people.

When employees love what they do, they expend extra effort, give up their spare time, take responsibility for the company and promote it to people they meet. For example, at the Californian-based sportswear company, Patagonia, very little money is spent on traditional approaches to marketing, largely because the company has a powerful group of employee advocates who have an ongoing dialogue with customers.

Employees talk up the brand because they believe in the quality of the product and the overt environmental stance of the company (their mission statement which was first written down a decade ago is “to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”).

Patagonia does not indulge in schemes to motivate or persuade employees to communicate what it stands for, rather people use the vision and values in both everyday and strategic decisions, such as its cast-iron guarantee to repair any product for life, its commitment to give 1 per cent of sales to environmental causes and its recycling of its products and those of competitors.

Employees are free to engage with the company and its purpose as much as they want to. There are plenty of long servers at the company, such as the world freestyle Frisbee playing champion and receptionist, Chip Bell (15 years), who maintain the culture, using a branded Patagonia Frisbee, but equally if people want to spend more time with their family, take time out to go mountain climbing or to take part in environmental protesting, Patagonia support that (they also pay your bail, if you get arrested).

The passion one finds among the employees at Patagonia is rare, not least because rather than recognising the desire of individuals to find fulfilment, companies too often squeeze the enthusiasm out of people by pushing them to demonstrate commitment. Go and talk to front-line employees of banks, telecoms companies and retailers and most often you find disillusionment, a lack of identification and a fair proportion of saboteurs (one in five by some counts) who range from the disgruntled blogger who attacks company policy to the automotive plant worker who deliberately creates a rattle in a car frame just to annoy customers. In spite of all the corporate talk of the importance of people, managers rarely value employees and tend to over-estimate the value of pay and rewards and under-estimate the value of doing a rewarding job well. Naomi Klein, in her book, No Logo argued that this desire to control is prevalent in the world of the “brand bullies”. When companies indulge in attempts to manipulate employees to believe in some bland vision by producing posters and company songs or paying people to be word-of-mouth advocates, depressingly it seems she is right. Yet, while most organisations will probably continue to think that you can make employees identify with what they stand for, there are some that have recognised you can trust employees to do the right thing most of the time. Commitment comes when people believe in a cause and are given the opportunity to be active participants in its development. Ask Chip Bell why he is so positive about his job and once you have got past the surf speak about “feeling genuinely groovy”, his answer is about belief – “I encompass every value of the company” and his ability to influence how the company is seen – “being the image and the voice of Patagonia”.

When I cite stories like this, people say, it’s all very well for sports companies such as Patagonia and Nike to work in this way, but they have naturally passionate employees. That may be true, but passion is not a function of industry, but of culture. The automotive saboteur who was putting bolts in the door panel of cars became a committed advocate for the brand when the plant became a joint venture with a Japanese company that had a more open and positive way of managing the business. You can also find passionate people in such diverse companies as Pret A Manger, Volvo Cars, Apple and Rabobank.

At Volvo’s factory in Gothenburg, Sweden, people read about cars, test drive cars, talk about cars and spend their spare time socialising with people who work at Volvo. To an outsider, that might all sound a bit obsessive, but it’s the result of the feeling of involvement. In Apple you find plenty of passion, not only from designers and software developers but also from those employees in Apple stores wearing company-branded T-shirts emblazoned with the word “genius” advising customers how to get the most from their ipods and Macs. A T-shirt may not have the permanence of a tattoo, but when it is worn with pride by a company employee it can be a powerful marketing tool.

taken from http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3129883.ece

The Death of Creative Director?

the title sounds provoking, isn’t it? sorry my big brother HL, that’s how Steve Jobs teach us to think different(ly)

recently there is a die-hard fan of Apple who create his own version of ipod touch and publish it at Youtube (just for your information, the most powerful woman on earth — Oprah Winfrey — just create her own show at Youtube!!!)

so what happen to that “illegal” ads? if you are old-style of brand owner, you migh sue him. if you are old-style of ads guy, you might say his ads will never ever win cannes festival ;)

anyway, Apple (again) thinks different(ly). Instead of bring him to court, involve him as the seed of word of mouth. Apple then ask Nick Haley to become Apple’s Creative Director and shift that “illegal” ads to “legal” ads

Imagine!!!! that new ads will be directed by Nick Haley and publish nation-wide on all US’ tv stations!!!

so, what are lessons learned?

First, believe it or not. whatever your consumers or fans do, don’t try to stop them. What a brand should do is how to accommodate them as the best advertising is your consumers. some says it as word of mouth!!!

Second, the future of marketing communication will shift dramatically. for the past 30 years, we have been bombarding by B2C advertisements aka Brand-to-Consumer Advertisements. Now, it is the era of C2C Advertisements - Consumer to Consumer Advertisement. Consumers start to disbelieve and dissatisfy with what brands are saying. Consumers start to think that All Marketer Are Liars (this is what Seth Godin wrote in his provoking book). the question is, consumers change their mindset and believe on marketing and advertisements, why don’t marketing and advertising guys change the way the treat consumers?

Third, imagine in the next 3 years, there will be no budget on creative agency anymore. why should a brand owner spend their time to make year-end annual plan which include creative agency fees? is there any strong reason? If they have thousands, millions, billions of consumers who buy, use, experience, eat, sleep, dream and making love with the product and brand a company make, why a brand should hire a creative guy who might probably (to some extent) only making love with your legal couple? which one knows better? consumers or agency?

no…no…. don’t get me wrong. I might looked too pessimistic and skeptic. anyway, please answer my question. Do you think which one is more believable, CONSUMERS or brand owners aka agency? ask your conscience and you know why you should believe what I say!!!

what I’m writing might probably hurt some of my readers, like a woman being kicked away by his lovely boyfriend who already making love with her ;) anyway, that’s the power of imagination!!! at least, I try to think different

welcome to the era of fans-generated ads
goodbye creative directors

Stay Hungry
Stay Foolish

Sumardy