Mark Vandegrift
Welcome back to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is our marketing maven, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, I don't know how many more titles we're going to be able to find for you. Well guess what, I have some brand news. We didn't cover any brand news the last couple episodes, so I thought maybe we would jump into something real quick. Hotels.com, you familiar with the brand?

Lorraine Kessler
Yes.

Mark Vandegrift
Well they have a new mascot. Do you remember their old mascot?

Lorraine Kessler
No.

Mark Vandegrift
Captain Obvious.

Lorraine Kessler
Okay. Vaguely vaguely vaguely. Guy in a weird uniform. Yeah, creepy kind of thing.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, he was dropped a couple of years ago, so they've now come out with a new one and it's a spokesbell called Bellboy. So it's a desktop bell. And. Yeah, he's been featured on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, the hotels.com website, the app, I don't know, everywhere, right? So the idea is that Bellboy will act as your travel guide like I need help with that, right? By sharing deals and rewards and tools and blah, blah, blah right? So the introduction of Bellboy allows the brand, here's what they say, to better resonate with audiences across the world.

Lorraine Kessler
Okay, this is what they say. Okay.

Mark Vandegrift
Yes, this is what they say.

Lorraine Kessler
I love these marketing.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. And guess what? He speaks every language in the world. I think. Yeah. How's that? Isn't that impressive?

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, because you know, once you ring the bell, it's rung across the world.

Mark Vandegrift
And not only that, but he can tweak his personality. So you talk about multi-personality. Yeah. Well, you know, someone in a different country might need a different personality. Maybe here we need humor and, you know, something more American and over in Europe, it might be more reserved. I don't know.

Lorraine Kessler
This is the animated bell with legs, right?

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Yep. So anyhow, what are your thoughts on this well-established, you know, getting rid of the well-established mascot of Captain Obvious? I don't know about if well-established or used frequently, let's call it that. Getting rid of that mascot and introducing this bellboy mascot a few years later.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I'd say that Captain Obvious didn't obviously catch on that well, right? I mean, so I don't think it's any loss to get rid of him and hang up his crazy uniform, whatever he wore. I think the most, I do remember a spot where he was in a swimsuit and they took a view from him in a pool. I don't know what the point was that the pool's filled. I don't know. It was really cringing. So, first of all, it's not a guy you want to see in that kind of swimsuit.

Mark Vandegrift
It'd be like seeing me in a swimsuit. We don't want to go there.

Lorraine Kessler
I think you see part of his butt cheeks. It's like, yeah, okay

Mark Vandegrift
Jeez. no, we're not. We're going to get. Oh man, we're going to get canceled now. You said, butt cheek.

Lorraine Kessler
okay. What is that, like saying SA or like

Mark Vandegrift
No, no, no, that's okay. Keep going.

Lorraine Kessler
So I think the new mascot, I mean, it's invented, it's a little more creative. It's little more unique. I hate these highfalutin statements that these marketing people feel obliged to put out about why they're doing what they're doing. When we know that when you're doing a service, you need tangibility, you lack that, it's a challenge. So whether we like it or not, whether this, what do call it, the bellboy, is the answer is irrelevant whether we like it. It's really how well does it do in creating sales and signups and bookings through hotels.com. I'm a little concerned about the media they're using because we talked a little bit in the last episode about short-term activation marketing which is designed to get signups, to get sales, to immediate actions versus really affecting long-term brand value. And they're, it seems to be using very transactional activation media. So, you know, I, this is just how they're starting, but I feel like they need to balance that, this, the use of this character with this activation because it's all a lot of promotional stuff, As you said, rewards and promotions. I think they need to balance the use of this mascot with more long-term brand building, commercials and beyond media that isn't designed for just transactional immediate reaction, but use the medias and it can be both digital and traditional that's more brand building.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, we see that with the way the duck was introduced, the Aflac duck. You know, think of it just insurance. Flo's been around forever. The Geico has been around forever or the Geico for Geico. They've been around forever, but there's always a personality development to it. This kind of seemed to come on and it's being used. I don't know about the, I don't know. It's about properly developing the personality. And Captain Obvious is a good example where he was just introduced and we weren't given insight into how that connected to the brand and the story of that character, et cetera. So I think maybe that's why they failed. They might be going down that same path again, don't you think?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think the path is a little different in that they seem to be focused on this gimmick of this little icon. It seems gimmicky now, which, as I said, is a little more engaging, a little more creative, but relegated only to promotions and rewards. What is hotel.com's position versus booking.com versus all these others?

Mark Vandegrift
Expedia or anything, yeah. Yep.

Lorraine Kessler
Expedia, well, they're owned by Expedia, right? Yeah. So, I mean, what is their position? What is it that they offer other than deals? And they're all doing that. So, I think it's, you know, you can't de-commoditize your brand just by having an icon. You have to have some point to what makes your brand unique. As expressed in Aflac, if you remember, they came out and their first commercials were not promotional. They weren't short term. It was all about, we created the first supplemental insurance. And here's why you need this. And here's why it's called. And this is the name, because it was a bunch of acronyms. And the duck helped with the name and was a curiously creative way of getting the name seated in your mind as supplemental insurance. I know what they did. They were the first. They own that category.
They did a great job. I don't know what hotels.com loans you need.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, they're just another option out there among a sea of options. So good. Well, this leads actually into our topic, which is effectiveness versus efficiency. And that Andrew Tindall guy that we referenced last week with the quotes, who wrote that article, he actually had a 15 minute presentation at the MADFest in 2024 and the whole topic was around effectiveness versus efficiency. So we're gonna jump in on that discussion to kind of go over what he said and just give our propositionist perspective on it. So let's get into that a little bit. The first thing is let's define what he calls effectiveness. He says it's incremental brand growth versus efficiency is optimizing the crap out of something. That's what he uses as effectiveness and efficiency. I'm not quite sure how that plays out in our uses of the words, but let's go with what he's talking about. He uses the tortoise and the hare analogy, right? We all know about that. So the tortoise, of course, winning the race because he's stuck to it, the hare with all these flashes of, of go rest, go rest, et cetera. So with that typical analogy, you always take long-term brand building. It takes time. It produces effective results. It's like the hare, right? Or I mean the tortoise. And then the hare is trying to get results through these flash in the pan kind of promotions. So comment a little bit on your take on these words and his definition of them from a position of standpoint.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, talk about Captain Obvious, I think, Tindall. I mean, effectiveness, he says, I think, too, in this thing, which you said to me, effectiveness needs to come before efficiency. Duh. Right? And focus on work that works. Duh. So.

Mark Vandegrift
Duh, Is that a technical term or do we need to define that?

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, duh. mean, it goes back to the quote from her other, shit served fast is still shit, right? So if it's more efficient, okay, but it's still shit. If it doesn't achieve the goal, and effectiveness is always the goal, right? You always want, now you don't want to be so slow that you're no longer effective, which can happen if you miss a moment, you know, because marketing is about moments too. It's about timing. So effectiveness is always the goal. And getting there with less waste, John Wanamaker, more efficiently, is always a benefit. I mean, it's better than being inefficient, right? But there's no substitute for being effective. So to me, these are two different things that he talks about. And it kind of goes back to this idea we were talking about where we've confused outputs, which he calls them, inputs. We've become output obsessive to a fault. And I think this is fueled by what Mark Ritson calls tech porn, or dazzled by those little activity measures, the KPIs, which are indicators of activity instead of achievement of the end goal. And I'll relate this medically, right? If you just took my KPIs, low cholesterol, low blood pressure, exercise, eat pretty healthy, and I have a heart attack, how the heck did that happen? Right? Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
In your Italian. Italians don't have heart attacks.

Lorraine Kessler
I mean, all right, I'm overweight, great, working on that, like I had no genetic history for this. KPIs can be deceiving and whether they're more efficient. Yeah, you always want to improve. You want to be more efficient. Why would you not want to be more efficient? But don't confuse the two. Effectiveness is the king. That's what you want. And I think that in the book that you and I talk about, The Long and the Short of It, which is the best data we have so far from IPA Data Bank, really proves for the first time for anyone who's interested in marketing that brand building trumps activation in terms of long-term effectiveness, growth, profitability, market share, sustainability, and that brand building actually helps short-term activation. But the reverse is not true. You can run a slew of sales-oriented campaigns and they're not going to produce, and you can measure them and feel like you're being very efficient with the media you're using, but they won't add up to the effective brand build that long-term makes companies successful.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. Well, I want to help our listeners on something because we kind of went to using the terms inputs and outputs, right? Or outcomes and Tindall touches on that and he says, in order to be effective, you need to focus on the inputs, but let's go back and define that. If I hear that as an advertiser and you say, focus on the inputs, I'm like, what does that mean? Give us some inputs that you, you value very highly for marketers, those who are listening to say, okay, you told me to focus on the inputs. What are those? Help me out with that.

Lorraine Kessler
So yeah, I think that's a great question, and to clarify for our audience, Mark, what is the difference between outputs and inputs from Tindall's perspective. And I think what he's talking about is what we input in the mind of the customer. What do we plant in their brain or mind about our brand? How it's different, the values that it stands for, the emotional takeaways that we have, the gut impressions that we create about that brand that become normative and that basically are held collectively by a large audience who have experienced that brand and that these are more valuable than these, I would call these kind of transactional outputs that we seem to be obsessed with. They're like little breadcrumbs and we hope they lead up over time to really building a strong brand value or image, but they don't necessarily. So I think that's what he's talking

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, as we, go through the process with clients, what has always been a revelation to them is that we are going back to the very nugget of the idea or the seed that we want to plant into the gray matter. Right. And they've always been out here. they're before we even really get into the depth of the appreciative discovery, so many are already trying to write taglines and headlines and all this other stuff. And we don't even know, well, what's the idea? Like we were asked at one point to do a creative evaluation, but we had no idea what the position was. Well, how do you evaluate a creative idea if you don't know the position? And they, after we talked them through that, they're like, well, no one ever told us this before. But that's the input. Let's say your tagline's already written and you are going between, let's say, reliability on one end or let's go with agility. Those are different enough, right? Agility says one thing, reliability says another. You throw a tagline in front of me. Reliability is a personality that I think is just over and over. It's it's very, very consistent. Whereas agility, if that's what your brand meaning is, that means you're jumping in based on circumstance and adapting. You're nimble, right? I don't get the sense that a tagline could be written that would work for both of those. Okay. So if I'm jumping to the creative or I'm jumping to

Lorraine Kessler
Unless you say reliable agility, which is insane. That's insane, I'm telling you.

Mark Vandegrift
Hey, don't mess with our listeners minds. They're trying to this concept down. Right? So you can't even evaluate creative when you don't know the idea.

Lorraine Kessler
What are you trying to get across? Other than a bunch of

Mark Vandegrift
Right. So here's my input that I've passed and I'm already trying to develop a creative output out of an input that I don't even know about. So I guess it's the fundamentals of good positioning and good marketing, you've got to go back to the greats because they all got it. I mean, it was second nature to them. They would never jump to, Oh should we be doing Facebook? Well, you didn't even ask all the right questions first and get the right answers before we should. Should we be using Facebook? Should we be using a billboard? Well, if I were Aflac, I certainly wouldn't have wanted a billboard when I was introducing the duck because the billboard can't share personality.

Lorraine Kessler
Right. Yeah. And it can't pronounce the name. It can't see the name in the mind with the quack, Aflac, you know, needed sound. needed, it created the, what needed to happen in what was the position needed sound to see the brain.

Mark Vandegrift
Right, it can't tell me. Yep. And so I think what Tindall's getting at, just to answer the input output question, is if I had to define efficiency, I would define it as taking a shortcut. It's not really efficiency in the best use of the word. So what these brands are trying to do is shortcut the process and they think they can do it when in fact they're failing at it and they don't even realize it and they're not taking that time to get the fundamentals down.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, maybe related to this is in the video that you mentioned, effectiveness in an age of efficiency at MadFest. If people skip to near a little bit beyond eight minutes, he presents data that I thought was very interesting that shows that creative that won awards only work half the time in producing demand and brand results. So we're back to John Wanamaker. So it wins awards. Now this isn't about efficiency, but this is about, again, at CMOs and ad agencies over grandizing what they do as the be-all. rather than achieving results for their patrons or advertisers, right? And it shows that if you're aimed at getting awards, that could be not very good for the advertiser. I think that's, and I know it's a little bit different, but I think he's just pointing at what is about, what's effectiveness mean. And it does mean ultimately results for advertisers, not results for the ad agency, not results for the CMO, results for the advertisers.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, and let's define efficiency then as far as the way we look at it. We say this all the time that if 100 % of your messaging is focused on one idea, that's the ultimate efficiency. You can't get more efficient than that because everything you do adds up to that one thing versus everything you do hitting a hundred things or a thousand things and they never add up. So to me, that's the definition of efficiency. Would you agree?

Lorraine Kessler
yeah. In terms of the message, yes, that's right. You're talking about the message. Yeah. You have to be strategically concise in your message, right? Because you can't bore and drone on and people don't remember a list in their mind. This is what salesmen do. Salesmen go in and this is the difference between marketing and sales. Salesmen go in and they figure out what floats your boat on a totem pole of kind of messages and they play to the message they think is going to...work for you. And they can do that because they have the afford, they're afforded the time in front of you and what have you. But marketing can't do that. Marketing doesn't and has precious little time to get its message across to you. You're not paying attention, you're time constrained, you have too many messages, there's too much going on, too much clutter. So marketing has to choose and prioritize, which is the hardest human thing to do, prioritize. What is the high idea, the most important idea, how do I start with that and then drill down? And so it has to be efficient from a message. And I even think that media can be efficient too in terms of what you use for what purpose. There are certain media that's more efficient in short-terms transactional results. We know that. You said we have data, we can see that that's working. But there's certain media that's more effective for brand building. And it may not be as efficient and it's not measured in the same way. It's a different beast, but you really need to have that in order to have the short term work even better. So you really need, it's not an either or argument. And I always hate when we get pushed into these either or situations like get rid of efficient campaigns that drive immediate sales. No. Get rid of brand marketing because I can't measure it the way I can measure my short term. No. You need both. You need a balance. And you need a balance for very good reasons that are proved in this study, this IPA data study. One that brand building drives the strongest long-term profitability, short-term does not. Two, that short-term activation campaigns do produce immediate sales, right? And sometimes you need that to keep the lights on, like depending on your business. But overuse can increase the customer sensitivity to price, which hurts profitability. So you have to be balanced with this stuff and recruiting new customers while maintaining price integrity is much more effectively done through long-term brand building than these promotions. So it's really both of them is what Mark Ritson coined that phrase and I think you talked about at the beginning and it does go back to what Roy Williams, our Wizard of Ads, talked about is the broader the reach, the broader, I'm going to talk media now. In the message, you should be narrow, strategically concise. You need to focus, right? But in media, the broader the reach, the broader the effects on existing customers and new customers. So there is more money wasted in advertising by underspending than overspending. And that was said by Morris Height. I think that's really true. And so I would like to advise from a media's message standpoint, stay narrow and focused and strategic. Media standpoint, hey, go for the broadest reach you can afford. Like, use everything you can if you have the resources.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, and efficiency, I think the people, the reason people like that word is because they automatically associate it with cost savings or time savings, right? So time savings wise, I get the biggest outcome soonest. And we touched on that. On the budget side, they look at it and say, can spend the least, but I'd like to reorient what efficient media purchase is based on efficiency. To me, is it spending the right amount on the right media? You know, we have we have people that have $10 and they want to go out and try 20 media. So they try this and they try that and they try that instead of let's take your entire small budget because it's not significant sufficient enough for 20 media and let's try one medium in sufficient amount that it's going to get the job done. Because with that same amount, if I tried 20 media, I'm not going to know which one is right because I didn't do enough of any of it.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, yeah, resources dictate strategy, right? if resources are ample, go for the broadest reach you can afford. But that even works if you have a small budget. I'm going for the broadest reach for this message that I can with this dollar. So very often that says it has, you have to choose the best media you can possibly choose in those, in that situation. One.

Mark Vandegrift
Right. yeah, and I think Tindall's getting, he's right about, because we always say it all the time. He has to be right. Cause we say it. Brand building is necessary. That's effectiveness. But in a bothism sense, efficiency is great because who doesn't want to be efficient. What we're not allowing for is that muddy middle ground where we have to learn the idea is that effectiveness and efficiency should both be going up at the same time.

Lorraine Kessler
that's great. That's great. Very well said. Yep. Very well said.

Mark Vandegrift
Right? Okay. If one's doing this while the other's doing this, chances are that one will eventually follow. So it has to be a parallel thing that's happening and we don't.

Lorraine Kessler
And they're related, but they're two separate things.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. And you don't give up on one in essence for the other. It's like you said, it's bothism. So I guess my commentary, you can't get all this across in 15 minutes, which is basically what he was trying to do. Yeah. And No, he races through this, yeah. His slides were very confusing too, so anybody who watches that, like way too much information on the slides. Yeah. Yeah. It's like trying to explain E= MC squared in 15 minutes. I mean, literally it is. What are we talking about? We're talking about the human mind. And I guess this is what drives me nuts about the discussion around AI and stuff like that is we are, we are underselling the complexity of the human mind. Every time we say AI can replace humans, the creativity aspect of a human mind alone is not explainable. Like scientists have tried for gazillions of decades now to figure out the way the mind works and they can figure out how data is passed and all that other stuff. But this overlay of what we have in terms of a soul combined with the physical, the physical, physicality, let me say it that way of who we are, there's just no explanation for it. You can't explain it scientifically. And yet we're trying to scientifically always say, this formula works to figure out how your advertising needs to happen. it just, yeah. Yep.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, yeah. If there were formulas, we'd all be using them. Yeah, right.

Mark Vandegrift
So effectiveness and efficiency to me is there's a lot behind that, but I think innately, If we're, you always like to use the term if we're in bed with our clients, right? Meaning if we're really, really working together in parallel, we know what this looks like. We know if we're being more effective, we know if we're being more efficient. So at the end of the day, I think the answer to this is you will know what it looks like when you see it. And you will know when it's not what you should be seeing.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I like what you're saying there. So you used a word that made me think of a Bill Birnbach quote, which I love, and we did quotes in a previous episode, but this is a good one. And he said that rules are what the artist breaks. The memorable never emerged from our formula. Right? So...the memorable requires creativity

Mark Vandegrift
Okay. Well, Lorraine, I think we covered the two E words. Maybe ours is E squared equals brand squared. I don't know. We'll, we'll have to make up a formula, sell it, and then everyone will be able to figure out their marketing. Right.

Lorraine Kessler
be effective efficiently.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, there you go. I like it. Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. Thank you to our listeners for joining us again this week. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your friends. And until next time, have an amazing day.