Mucksack.

Still Toughing It Out

Columbia is still airing its “Tested Tough” series of television ads. A 30-second spot during the Daily Show last night showed Tim Boyle in a floppy hat abandoned by his mother in the desert. 

These ads, while funny, do an odd job of positioning the brand. They were developed a few years ago by Portland ad agency BPN as an alternative to product focused ads that touted the toughness of specific Columbia products. The “Tested Tough” campaign is another way of hammering the same nail: the brand is defined by rugged products.

What’s odd is not the creative, it’s the strategy and the media. These ads air on MTV and Comedy Central. The media plan and the humor in the ads is aimed at a younger audience. But the messages are all wrong for that audience. When was the last time you met a 24-year-old more concerned about the durability of a jacket than the way it looked? And what twenty-something wants to look like a jowly 60-year-old in an oversized Gilligan hat?

Pitching Instructions

REI’s most recent marketing email tries hard to fill the void between back-to-school and holiday shopping. Too early for winter sports and too late for summer camping gear, October is not a great month for hard goods. To drum up excitement, the retailer has landed on one of my favorite come-ons, the create-a-category marketing initiative. This season’s newest category: the three-and-a-half-season tent. Here’s the blurb from the email:

“Our all-season, lightweight REI ASL Tents bridge the gap between backpacking and mountaineering tents.”

There are a few perks for outdoor industry types. Pro deals. Bringing your dog to work. And making fun of mainstream marketers’ horribly misinformed use of outdoor imagery. A perennial classic is the motivational poster. So, when I saw the new MasterCard ad in the back of this week’s New Yorker, I was ready for a healthy dose of self-righteous mockery.

On second glance, though, it wasn’t so bad. The gist of the ad made sense. The gear was the real thing and the photo didn’t look too goofy—a little staged but clearly not shot by a commercial photographer on a day trip from Manhattan. However, the dollar figure for the gear total seemed a little low. A Mountain Hardware expedition tent and a Nikon digital SLR? We had to be talking more than two grand. A quick trip to REI.com and Backcountry.com resolved the issue. Here’s the bill:

Black Diamond Vaporlock Carabiner : $14
Mammut 60m 10.5mm Dry Rope : $210
Mountain Hardwear Wraith -20° Bag : $555
Mountain Hardwear EV3 Tent : $750
MSR Pocket Rocket Stove : $40
Snow Peak Titanium Cook Kit : $40
Mountain Hardwear Trance Pack : $169
Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera : $530

Grand Total : $2,308

Pretty close to MasterCard’s $2,106 tally. Given the choice of gear and the fairly authentic-looking mountain shot, I’d say there was a designer at MasterCard’s ad agency who knew a thing or two about playing in the woods. What’s more impressive is that it didn’t get watered down by an account manager or client-side comments like “aren’t tents supposed to be green?”

I was also pretty sure the location shot was a stock photo. It took all of five minutes to find it here at Getty Images. What, you didn’t think they actually sent a photographer above treeline, did you?

In a super nerdy outdoor footnote, the shot is taken on Ruth Mountain in the North Cascades, a walk-up, but one with a Fred Beckey pedigree. It’s pretty much a daytrip so the EV3 and -20 bag might be overkill.

Green Brands vs. Green Products

Greenness is not goodness. While green motivated consumers will be influenced by products with sustainable attributes and brands with green credibility, greenness is no substitute for the tried and true differentiators of style, color, quality and feature set. For even the most ideologically driven fleece top buyer, the desire for a cozy, good-looking top comes first. In most instances, a green glow can influence buying decisions only when a potential buyer is already attracted to the product.

That doesn’t mean brands should bury their green messages. To decide where such messages fall in your marketing mix, it’s helpful to look at how they work differently at a brand and product level.

Green Products: Direct Participation
Products with green or sustainable components give consumers a way to directly participate in the green movement. By buying a green product, they are not only supporting a green brand, they are personally reducing environmental impact. They can take their participation home with them. They can show it to friends. In many cases, they can even measure their personal contribution to impact reduction. Buying a green product feels like you’re making a difference.

Green Brands: Indirect Participation
Brands perceived as green are likely to benefit from a halo effect. Green motivated consumers will think better of the brand and may be more inclined to associate themselves with it. At the product-evaluation level, this may be enough to tip the balance in favor of the green brand, but it’s less emotionally gratifying to consumers than buying a green product because it’s less tangible. Buying a green brand feels like voting for someone who’s making a difference.

The most effective combination of marketing messages for outdoor brands and retailers is to promote company-wide green initiatives at the brand marketing level and green product attributes at the product level. If you can only choose one, green products trump green brands. That is, if consumers want them to begin with.

More on Sustainable Marketing and the outdoor industry here: http://www.geartrends.com/geartrends/upload/Summer07_marketing.pdf

Green Teens

Promo magazine reports on a Jupiter Research study on the intersection of American teens’ concern for the environment and their use of the internet. Interesting tidbits include:

• 38% of teens are concerned about the environment.
  
• 15% consider themselves hardcore environmentalists.
  
• Green Teens skew slightly female.
  
• They’re more likely than the average teen to shop online.
  
• They’re more likely to respond to online advertising and sweepstakes.
  
  

It's Not Brain Surgery

Satellite Design continues to push the boundaries of neuroscience. Well, sort of. Last week, we released our quarterly white paper on a model for developing marketing messages. We call it “Lustify and Justify.” It’s something we’ve developed to help sort out how to create brand and product messages that appeal to consumers on both a rational and emotional level. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You can read all about it here.

Now we think we’re pretty smart over here but we never though our little model, developed from anecdote, observation and experience, would reach the same conclusion as a research project by a bunch of brainiac neuroscientists at Stanford. So you can imagine our surprise when we heard this story on National Public Radio the day after we published our article.

Using MRIs to scan the brain function of their subjects, the scientists are discovering just what happens in our brains when we shop. It turns out that two very distinct areas of the brain light up as we evaluate products for purchase: a pleasure center when we first encounter the product and a fear center when we second-guess ourselves for wanting it. The Stanford researches, pioneers in the new science of neuroeconomics, found that emotions related to desire and fear appear to play a big role in consumer decision making. Not exactly lustify and justify but pretty close. We’ll be sending our PhD applications in soon.

The Red Menace

There’s an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review on the widespread environmental degradation of China and the impact it may have on American companies who do business there. The piece, Scorched Earth: Will Environmental Risks in China Overwhelm Its Opportunities?, is worth a read, maybe even the price of a subscription for brands heavily dependent on Chinese factories. Basically, the authors’ take is based on the shrewd assumption that sooner or later, the Chinese government is going to have to do something about the abysmal and rapidly worsening Chinese environment and that one of the most attractive options open to them is the scape-goating of multi-nationals who do business there. What will trigger government action? Take your pick. The leading contenders are the country’s environmental health and the declining health of its population. The SEPA, China’s equivalent of our EPA, estimates that environmental problems shaved a cool 10% off the country’s 2006 GDP. And despite the difficulty of complaining about anything to their government, the Chinese population may soon be reaching the end of its patience for choking air and water pollution. The HBR article aurthors write:

The effect on the population is alarming. Already more than 400,000 people die each year as a result of the country’s air pollution, according to environmental expert Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba, and an estimated 190 million people drink water so contaminated that it makes them sick. Some 40 million people have had to migrate because their local ecology can no longer sustain them. The Chinese leadership is now concerned that environmental degradation is leading to social unrest.

Local Favorite

Big retailers have learned that positioning themselves as an information resource is good for business. Helping consumers understand the products they carry and how to use them builds customer loyalty, keeps the retailer top-of-mind and often makes their store the first stop in a consumer’s quest to buy new gear.

Budgets and economies of scale allow larger retailers to create extensive consumer education content. REI produces dozens of fact sheets that consumers can access in store when evaluating products. Crutchfield, who has built a booming portable electronics business through an information-intensive customer service model, has a whole website devoted to customer education.

What’s less common is an independent retailer who has the resources to develop content to communicate with customers as an information destination. For most, a few well trained sales associates will be as close as they ever get to an customer education component.

That’s why my experience this weekend at a small outdoor store was so unusual. Here’s what happened. I went to Shasta for the weekend with my family. We met some friends from Portland and, bright and early Saturday morning (11 AM), decided we’d take the kids climbing. We needed a friendly toprope spot. With no locals in our address books, we thought we’d swing by the neighborhood, mom and pop outdoor retailer and see what they knew.

The Fifth Season is the outdoor store of record in Shasta City. I had known them as an information resource for climbing Mt. Shasta (they have a recorded message on route conditions and weather), but I didn’t realize that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

When I asked about a toprope spot, something very interesting happened. The woman behind the cash wrap turned around, opened a file drawer behind her and began pulling out papers. The store had a database of local climbs, hikes, paddles and who-knows-what-else, all easily accessible to staff and Xeroxed so that they could be given to customers like me. The staffer walked us through a couple options based on questions about the experience level of our kids and then sent us on our way with hand-drawn maps and a typed set of directions to the crags.

I was dumbstruck. With a little foresight and some time and money spent copying and filing, they had built an information resource that outclassed REI. What’s more, it was the kind of local knowledge that big chains would have trouble gathering. Independent store owners, managers and associates may have to work a little harder to create customer education materials, but done right, it’s the kind of home-town advantage that can turn a drop-in customer into a rabid fan.

A Convenience Truth

Twenty or thirty years ago, product innovation was all about quality. Rich, vibrant FM replaced tinny AM on the radio. CDs edged out albums in the record stores. Products got better and better and it looked like the cycle would go on forever.

And then something happened. Over the past ten years, the pursuit of ever increasing quality has faded into the background. Today’s innovations focus on adding convenience rather than improving quality. Fast. Easy. Quick. There’s nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t like an iPod?

Consumers have voted with their dollars. They’re willing to give up a little audio quality to move from the relative hassle of CDs to the convenience of MP3s. Tivo is another example. Timeshiffted DVR TV just doesn’t look as good. And TV on the web is even worse, but it looks like that’s the next big leap in convenience.

It’s starting to happen in sporting goods too. In the bike industry, cruisers, commute bikes and urban utility bikes are cropping up everywhere. The market for ever-lighter, ever-less-comfortable, race-oriented bikes is flat. But new riders are being lured onto wide, extra-cushy saddles by the comfort and convenience of less aggressive bikes—the kind of bikes most hardcore riders would call low quality.

Will the outdoor industry react? The focus of innovation over the past ten years has been on ultra-lightweight gear, but maybe the shift to convenience is getting started in the outdoor market as well. JetBoil has made a name for itself making camp cooking more convenient. Camelbak is trying to open up new markets with an easier-to-use water bottle. Is there room in the low and mid-end of the market for pop-up tents, Velcro® closure sleeping bags and packs with interior lights?