Rush at the Met

Jaws no longer drop at the thought of paying $375 for a prime seat at the Metropolitan Opera. It's the $20 orchestra seats that have people gaping.

Read The New York Times article.

Subconscious mind of the consumer

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind. How does a marketer reach the subconscious? Zaltman explains in this Q&A.

Read the Harvard Working Knowledge article.

Why blogging matters

As Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard, Erik Kintz discusses key industry trends (such as the social web) and best practices for building future marketing functions. On his Marketing Experience blog, Erik invites five marketing and creative gurus to discuss Why Blogging Matters.

Read the post on The Marketing Excellence blog.

Unsuccessful overtures

Judith Dobrzynski writes about a recent Knight Foundation study that shows where orchestras err in reaching out to new audiences.

Here's a test for symphony orchestra lovers. True or false:

1) To woo younger audiences, which are bored by Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, orchestras must play more contemporary works, even at the risk of alienating their aging core audience.

2) By offering free concerts, orchestras will expose more people to classical music and generate new ticket-buyers.

3) Orchestras can create new audiences by designing and offering educational programs for the vast numbers of Americans who know little about classical music.

4) To ensure the survival of orchestras over the long-term, schoolchildren must be exposed to classical-music concerts.

The answers are false, false, false and false.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Read Greg Sandow's response in his ArtsJournal.

Barber of Seville on Letterman

There is a whirlwind of change at the Metropolitan Opera -- new management and a new brand strategy and design that is overflowing with innovation and excitement. I've been preparing a feature article on the Met's switch to emotional advertising and customer-friendly information design.  And just when I think I have finished writing, up pops something new and exciting to consider.

Now comes the Act I finale of a new Barber production to be performed on David Letterman, Wed, Nov 8 at 11:30pm on CBS. Juan Diego Flórez, Diana Damrau, Peter Mattei, John Del Carlo and Sam Ramey are featured, plus a chorus of 16 and 22 members of the Met Orchestra.

Go to the Met's Web site.

Go to the Late Show with David Letterman site.

Seth Godin: Marketing creativity

Seth Godin writes about the two things that kill creativity — fear and lack of inspiration.

I believe that every single person I've met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, is able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn't it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it's also a lack of imagination.

Read more on Seth's blog.

LA Opera's Web 2.0 debut

LA Opera ventures into Web 2.0 relationship marketing with video clips and podcasts of its Manon production, set in the late 1940s by by Emmy-nominated director-choreographer Vincent Paterson. Paterson is featured on four behind-the-scenes podcasts — interviews with soprano Anna Netrebko, tenor Rolando Villazón, costume designer Susan Hilferty and vocal director Denise Massé.

Listen to the podcasts at laopera.com.

Bank as lifestyle and music producer

Umpqua isn’t just a financial institution. It’s a lifestyle. And now a music producer.

Certainly the message you would get if you were to visit the Umpqua branch in Portland’s trendy Pearl District neighborhood seems only vaguely related to the mundane business of certificates of deposit, checking accounts and loans. With free wi-fi access, Umpqua brand coffee, a spacious seating area and flat-screen television monitors, the place has been designed to suggest a stylish hotel lobby where you’re tempted to hang out (and, perhaps, read a tastefully printed brochure about certificates of deposit, checking accounts and loans). This and other Umpqua branches also serve as the setting for things like sewing groups, yoga classes and movie nights. Actually, the word “branch” is not used in Umpqua’s official internal terminology: the bank operates 127 “stores” in Oregon, California and Washington. As Lani Hayward, who oversees “creative strategies for the company,” explains, Umpqua sees itself as a retailer.

The reason for this strategy is the same one that leads companies across many sectors to play the lifestyle card: a proliferation of competitors peddling largely interchangeable wares. If a bank wants to stand out, it’s fairly difficult to do so with the financial products it offers. It can, however, differentiate the manner in which it sells and packages those products.

According to Hayward, the central idea of Umpqua’s image is “community hub.” The company trains its employees through a program offered by the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, with the goal of providing service that’s better than what you might expect from a bank. And it gives its managers the autonomy to, for example, stay open during a snowstorm if the manager thinks the customers will want that. But the community-hub notion also plays a role in the curious-sounding decision to start selling CD’s (the kind with music on them) through a program called Discover Local Music.

Read The New York Times Magazine article.

Remarkable experiences building Starbucks

“You still have to be remarkable if you want to get remarked about,” writes John Moore in his new book, Tribal Knowledge: Business brewed from the grounds of Starbucks corporate culture.

Starbucks is an experiential brand that strives to be interesting in order to get customers interested. Because the customer experience at Starbucks is the marketing for Starbucks, everything matters.
Not just one thing…E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
Everything matters because everything is an act of communication with customers. And, E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G includes the following:

The package design of whole bean coffees matters.
The hours of operation signs on the front door matters.
The way the chocolate-covered espresso beans are merchandised on the shelves matters.
The music playing in-store matters.
The way baristas dress matters.
The way your espresso drink is prepared and delivered matters.
The promotional sign placed at the main cash register matters.
The lighting in the restrooms matters.
E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G to Starbucks matters.

You’d be hard pressed to find a Starbucks employee say, “That doesn’t matter. No customer will ever notice it.” Because chances are a customer will notice. And that’s why EVERYTHING MATTERS to Starbucks.

Read a pdf excerpt from the book. Go to ChangeThis.

Framing, emotions and irrational decisions

Marketers have known people often make decisions based more on emotion than on rational processing of information. Oddly, for decades economists ignored this apparent truth, assuming that business managers strove for maximum profits, buyers and sellers slid smoothly along supply and demand curves until they intersected, and so on.

What does this research in neuroeconomics tell marketers and would-be neuromarketing practitioners?

First, it’s a good reminder of what marketers already know — emotions play a big role in decisions, and the way you frame a question can shape the answer you get. Second, it highlights both the differences in response between individuals as well as their similarities. Most marketing campaigns try to frame relevant issues in a way that makes their product or service attractive; this research suggests that marketers would do well to look for those emotional hot buttons — risk of loss, pain, etc. — and consider them as they lay out the issues.

Read the post in neurosciencemarketing.com.