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.

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.

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.

Authenticity in the experience economy

"Authenticity is the thing consumers respond to the most," says Diego Scotti, VP of Global Advertising for American Express.

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore are working on their next book, focused on authenticity as a new consumer sensibility. Gilmore writes:

In the Agrarian Economy, the dominant purchase criteria was Availability (price being set by supply-and-demand, and only influencing the quantity of materials purchased in the marketplace). In the Industrial Economy, Cost became the dominant driver of purchases as Mass Production made more and more goods affordable to the masses. In the Service Economy, Quality came to dominate, when the performance of offerings became most important as consumers increasingly rely upon others to perform certain activities on their behalf.

And now, in the Experience Economy, in an increasingly unreal world of staged places and mediated events, consumers want Authenticity. Thus AMEX desires to "be associated with people of substance, whose success is based on real achievement" and entices celebrities with the opportunity to craft their life-stories (as a commercial) and not just monetary compensation. (Indeed, selling out for the big bucks is not "being real".)

"My Life, My Card..." Diego Scotti on making the directors' series commercials for American Express.

Fast Company features guest blogging by Experience Economy's Jim Gilmore.

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.