Mohawk Chevrolet

Here's a little bit of levity for a Monday morning (click here).

Going forward, you might think about how marketing efforts fit on this continuum.

Mohawk Chevolet is at a turning point ... opposite of paying third parties for customers, with the potential to become creative.

If you want to see what moving up the right arrow looks like, think about Progressive and their Flo and Dr. Rick storylines. Here's Dr. Rick on weather. I personally like the Keith character.

Having had a front row seat as analytics transformed marketing, there is a 'sterilization' process that happens when you start to measure things. Stuff you've always done now looks painfully expensive, and is immediately dropped in favor of sterile things (paying for stuff on Facebook). Soon enough, everybody is doing "sterile things" ... and the slightest deviance from sterile is viewed as being "creative".

Do I need to bring it back to headphones? Yes? Ok. Headphones are now measured on how similar they are to what is called a "Harman Curve". The curve is essentially an average that users set their equalizers at when asked to make sound "sound good". This introduction of analytics/measurement showed that humans consistently have a similar sound profile, with each person deviating modestly from the profile.

Now, if you were going to create a new headphone, would you create it similar to this curve, or very different from this curve, especially if you were trying to appeal to a mass audience? You'd try to come up with something similar to the curve. Now imagine what happens if every manufacturer tried to come up with something similar to the curve? Everything would be the same ... sterile, lacking creativity.

In fact, if you try to deviate from the curve, you'll have the curve people come after you. "Sub-bass is exaggerated and the treble is too spicy" (which is actually called u-shaped, FYI). People evaluate how close you come to the curve, not how good the unit actually sounds.

That's where we are at today in marketing. "Are your Facebook ads working?" is on the far left of the relationship depicted above. Mohawk Chevolet is at the turning point in the curve depicted above.

Yes, I get it, I'm about to get a message from a CEO about how wrong I am. It's ok. If you are on the left-side of this relationship and your efforts are working, yes, you are going to think I'm hopelessly wrong. As the late Don Libey often asked ... "what if"?