March 28, 2013 in Brand Strategy, Branding, Media, PR and Pop Culture by Clay Zeigler
HEADS UP: What the New Pope Is Teaching Us About Marketing

Screen shot 2013-03-28 at 1.21.36 PMI can’t get enough of the new pope, and apparently I’m not alone. Google “pope-francis” and you get 656 million results about someone who has been going by that name for just a few weeks. And whether or not Pope Francis is able to take the Catholic Church in a new direction, he’s already demonstrating how a damaged brand can be protected — even enhanced — by focusing attention on initiatives that counter objections to the brand in new ways.

The Catholic Church’s problems are well-chronicled, led by the painful clergy-sex scandal, its lingering effects, and more recently the tales of stolen records and Vatican misconduct. But these days, the Church’s problems are mentioned only in passing, as in this story from Reuters:

The 76-year-old former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina has inherited a Vatican rocked by a scandal in which documents leaked to the media spoke of alleged corruption in its administration and depicted prelates as fighting among themselves to advance their careers.

But that’s the fourth paragraph of a story that focuses instead on something new. Here’s the lead:

Beginning a busy program of Easter events, Pope Francis on Thursday urged Catholic priests to devote themselves to helping the poor and suffering instead of worrying about careers as Church “managers.”

That’s just marketing manna from heaven: The pope is busy. He’s telling priests to help the poor and suffering. (Who can be against that?) And he’s telling priests to get out there and help people instead of sitting around in “introspection,” which is a nice word for squabbling.

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June 14, 2012 in Content Marketing, Marketing, Media, PR and Pop Culture by Clay Zeigler
ADVICE: Marketing Realities in Black and White

The newspaper in New Orleans is laying off a third of its staff and shifting to three-days-a-week publication in just the most recent example of that industry’s decline. Meanwhile, Politico is hiring 20 journalists to beef up its coverage of the economy and the military. The easy analysis of their diverging fortunes is that the Times-Picayune primarily is in print and Politico is online, but it’s more complicated than that. The real reasons are familiar to marketers, or at least they should be.

Newspapers like the Times-Picayune aren’t dying solely because they’re in print. They’re dying because they failed to hold onto their audiences in profitable print and rushed free content online under the mistaken premise they could sell advertising there. Politico isn’t growing just because it’s online. It’s growing because it’s found an audience, built value with that audience, and extracts that value with a subscription model.

Does Politico share free content? Sure it does, a lot of it. But it doesn’t share everything. That helps increase the value of the content not shared with everyone. More importantly, Politico has found an audience that places a high value on its content, and it’s asking that audience to give something for it.

Find an audience that values what you do and build rapport that audience. Do that by sharing, but don’t share everything. Ask consumers to give you something in exchange for your best work. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the basic roadmap for effective content marketing.

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June 7, 2012 in Media by Clay Zeigler
HEADS UP: A Case Study on Why Newspapers Still Matter

Here’s a rarity: a feel-good story about newspapers.

Valerie Wigglesworth was an editor at The Dallas Morning News when a reorganization landed her in a suburban bureau as a reporter. She hadn’t worked as a reporter for a decade, but she was determined to succeed. As the lone breadwinner for her family of four, she had more at stake than most.

It took some time, but she steadily improved as a reporter and writer. She could write a nice feature story, and cover breaking news. Then Valerie and colleague Matthew Haag learned about Exide Technologies, owners of a lead smelter that has been operating outside Dallas since the 1960s. These days Exide — and the lead pollution it creates — are surrounded by a fresh-scrubbed suburb, Frisco, Texas, one of the fastest-growing places in the country.

Valerie and Matthew recognized a health threat that most of Valerie’s fellow Frisco residents couldn’t see out their car windows, and they started writing. They wrote stories about lead pollution and the health threat posed by the plant, especially to children. The city manager started returning her calls, so Valerie wrote some more. The plant’s management wanted her to come take a tour. She did, then wrote some more. Groups formed. Public hearings were held. She wrote some more. She won a grant to conduct soil testing. Valerie wrote some more.

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May 14, 2012 in Brand Strategy, Media, Media Orchard, PR and Pop Culture by Clay Zeigler
RANT: Shock Value and Why Time Magazine Got it Wrong

Last week we got two reminders about going too far: the one you heard about and one you probably didn’t. But they prove the same point: If you’re going to go too far to call attention to something, you had better have a good reason and you had better deliver.

By now more than enough people have weighed in on the Time magazine cover that shows a Los Angeles woman breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son. The reaction was predictably mixed, but let’s focus instead on motivations. The stated reason for the photo was to illustrate a story on attachment parenting, which advocates extended breast-feeding, sleeping in the same bed with children, and carrying them in slings. Another reason for the photo could have been the slow decline of American news magazines. But is either an adequate reason to go too far?

Courage and ‘Emblematic Images’

The other reminder about going too far came with the death on Thursday of Horst Faas, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his photographs of wars in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Let’s let his New York Times obituary take it from there:

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March 2, 2012 in Media, Media Orchard by Clay Zeigler
IDEA GROVE VIDEO: We Help Clients Who Help People

Several of Idea Grove’s clients are in the business of helping people — healthcare companies that benefit dialysis patients, outplacement firms for transitioning workers, even an app for shoppers looking for the best price.

 
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