Direct TV – Marketing Communications – What happened to creativity?

Founded in 1990, Direct TV has had monumental success over the years with being ranked number 1 in customer satisfaction in selling television experience with over 39 million customers, having over 70 HD channels. Cable free technology has become their number differentiator and has affected majority of the cable TV companies. Direct TV promises its customers to “continue to develop the unique, innovative programming and services that you have come to expect and enjoy from DIRECTV.”

Direct TV has a very strong marketing communication budget that has lead them to increase their client base from 15 million in 2005 to 39 million in 2015 with an 11% cumulative growth.  In a stagnated industry growing in double digits draws a lot of attention from investors.

Recently they launched an advertisement starring a talking horse. Drawing millions of marketing communication budget funds towards this integrated campaign launch from television to the home page in their website. The below image is capture from Direct TV home page.

The fundamental value proposition of direct TV is the innovation in the distribution of the television experience. No longer cable when you have direct TV. When a company positions itself through innovation you expect a company to drive its entire strategy based on that concept.

1.       A bikini model

I do not understand the message Direct TV is trying to communicate to the world using a bikini model. Sexuality is not a part of direct TV’s value proposition. When a company for 12 consecutive years has become the number one in customer services, wouldn’t the company want to communicate that, why customers are happy using Direct TV? What special product augmented features offered by Direct TV? Instead they go with a bikini model.

2.     Why does this look like the old spice add

What has happened to the creativity of Direct TV? The first glance on this add just remembered me with the old spice add. It makes sense to have a male model in his beach outfit on a white horse to sell a perfume add. Perfumes are for attraction, it is about presenting yourself. But with direct TV a bikini model on a horse, it just don’t make sense.

I like the idea of the talking horse, you are selling television as an experience. You can expect to see anything based on the producer’s creativity. Which is a fact and people know it, they actually know what television channels offers, Americans know what HBO offers. Direct TV is just mechanism helping to distribute that. We do not want the largest distribution channels to tell us what they are distributing. We do not want Fedex to advertise on behalf of their primary source. Let the television channels to their own advertising, Direct TV can stick with what they do best, they distribute an experience. You should tell the world why Direct TV customers are more satisfied.  

Camry the Bold Choice – Which part is BOLD!!!

Toyota is synonymous for quality. Management concepts like “Just in Time”, quality management concepts like “Total Quality management”, materialized with the evolution of the Toyota production system. Any industry, any company considers Toyota to be the ultimate benchmark for quality. The case study of how Toyota became one of the bestselling vehicles despite its European and American rivals.

I was surprised to see the recent advertisements of Toyota Camry, positioning Camry as a bold choice. When positioning a brand a company attempts to send stimuli to the human brain to create a perception about the brand. Either I do not know the meaning of the world or I really don’t understand which part of driving a Camry is the BOLD CHOICE???

The Real Bold Choice

For me a bold choice would be, go sky diving, around the globe in an air balloon as the greatest entrepreneur Richard Branson once did.  Or in the vehicle space driving the world’s fastest car or f1 formula racing is a bold choice because bold choices comes with the “RISK” component attached to it.

As per research figures from motorintelligence.com from 2014 to 2015 April, the sales have dropped by 10.4%. Considering the maturity level of Toyota the most respected vehicle manufacturing company surprised to witness such a blunder.

In one of their advertisements a family Mom, Dad and the son goes to a Toyota agent to purchase a Camry. This is a terrible analysis of their target market and positioning. When you have a kids, you don’t go for bold choices, you go for safe options, and you go for options with convenience. 

Positioning Blunder

Surprisingly, although in their advertisements they go on to speak about Camry being the bold choice. But not a single product attribute is discussed on any of the advertisements. I personally think this is a serious positioning blunder from Toyota. Camry is the family vehicle, just look at the profiles of customers who has bought a Camry, you don’t want to mess up a brand which is already doing well.

When will I ever learn. Culture Shock!!!

My recent consultancy assignment to United States has been an extremely difficult learning curve. Especially adapting to culture. Before sharing my views on the culture of United States I would like to initially set a baseline to my understanding on the term culture. I would like to stick to a simple definition of culture which is Deal’s and Kenedy’s (2000) the “The way we do things around here”.

We are Independent

The way Americans do things challenges the fundamental concepts of humanity. One of the most prominent philosopher’s Aristotle stated that ““Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human”. In simple words men can survive without one another. Americans challenge this core concepts of human existence by giving prominence to “independence”.

We have a support system to be Independent

Me being a Sri Lankan, even a tea is not consumed alone, drinking a tea is accompanied by someone. To understand how independent American’s are, the best place to go is their source of food. If you go to a super market, most of the food requirements are easy to make, serving one person and packaged for ease. Unlike in Asian cultures where  the mother of the house prepares food for everyone in the house each meal preparation takes 2, 3 hours of preparations, in US the food preparation not only takes a maximum of 30 minutes and also anyone can make the food.

I don't need your help

Recently a person traveling on a wheel chair was trying to open the door it seemed a bit difficult for the person. Me being an Asian, and we being taught to help whoever needs help I went to help him to open the door. The person was offended that.  I learnt that day Americans are independent people who never ever give up. They want to stand by themselves. So to speak there is so much to learn.

Well planned life cycle

It is amazing when I heard the story of an old family themselves selling their house and deciding to go to an elderly home. From where I come from making parents to stay at an elderly home is a cultural crime. I still would have love to see the American culture to be a bit more family centric, it seems they have moved forward from the family concept with a good understanding.

No one will help you - Grow up

I recently moved from Connecticut to Boston. In Sri Lanka if I was moving from one place to another. All my relations would have come to help me, all the neighbors would have come to help. This instance no one knew, I just went to home depot got the packaging material and called the movers. None of my neighbors even knew that I existed. This is cultural shock to me, but I am learning every step of the way. These cultural aspects surely have made America the power house in the world.

Who thinks in Pictures?

Continuing from the previous blog article, I wish to further elaborate on the eye movements and how to interpret them.  What benefits would it bring to your day to day life? Will you be able to understand whether a person is lying?

Eye is moving up left and up right.

The first thing that we need to understand is if the eye is moving upwards, most likely the person is a visual person. Important thing to note is that eye movement itself does not tell whether the person is a visual or not. But might give a glimpse to understand whether the person is thinking in images or sounds or talking to thyself.

Eye moving upwards means most of the time is that a person is thinking in pictures. If the eye moves towards the up left corner. That means the person is referring to an area which the already has experienced. The person is referring to a memory in pictures. If you ask a simple question like do you remember the first day you went to school and you see the person’s eye moving up left corner. The person is remembering that very instance in pictures and images. The color of the cloth the person was wearing all that they try to remember.

If the eye is moving towards the upright corner. The person is constructing something in pictures. If you ask a visual about how yourself in 10 years. His eye would move towards the upright corner, where the person constructs that position in images. Identifying these simple things will help you a lot in building rapport with a person.

Visuals use words like “see”, “envision”, “looks great” where their vocabulary has a close link with how they think. Which is in pictures. Pay close attention to these simple things, you can easily create rapport at the subconscious level with visual people using words to in line with their thinking pattern.

Although this sounds very simple, in practice it is very difficult to identify and leverage on this knowledge areas.  

What Eyes Tell You..

You need to look directly in the eye of a person to really understand that person. Is this statement overrated? Day in and day out we hear things like this in the movies we watch, with the people we work with. If the person does not look in your eyes is he really lying? Or is it all a myth.

If you really try to analyze this, from our sensory inputs eyes dominates on how we perceive this world. In our minds we do not remember the world as a Smell, world has no taste, it is not the feeling of touching sand on the ground nor a sound that depicts or reminds us about the world. The world is a set of images right embedded in our minds. Even if you look at the pre-historic era our ancestors left us with carvings inside caves to depict what they saw the world.

The shape of our eyes are a bit similar to animals who hunt for food like tigers, lions. These animals have pointed eyes so that they can have sharp focus on the pray. Likewise our eyes are focused and pointed to perceive the world from a focused view width. But if you look at innocent animals like rabbits their eyes are big and direct outwards so they can see any predator who is approaching with a wider view width. Likewise evolutionary humans with their advanced thinking capacity their sensory input glands has also evolved significantly.

From evolution perspective is there any truth behind the fact that if a person is lying that the person will not look into the eye? Has evolution made us more defensive or has evolution made us more offensive? Think of the last time you closed your ears from your palms so that you could not hear the noise? Highly likely that either the sound was unpleasant or of high decibels or it roused fear. When will we close our noses, is if the smell that we absorb is unpleasant. When will we want to stop tasting something? Isn't it because we do not like the experience we are having?

Likewise when you think about eyes, you tend to look away if the experience is unpleasant. Remember when you are watching news and see a sensitive video, the immediate reaction is take your eyes away from what you are seeing.  Food for thought is that, is the person really lying or does the person not like the experience?

Actually there is a way of understanding, what a person is thinking based on where the person’s eye ball moves. Brain has different compartments which stores different information. Visual, Auditory information is stored in different areas of the brain. Thus if you carefully observe a person’s eye, you can see the eye ball moving towards the Upper Right, Upper left, Right, left, Lower Right and Lower Left. Just see whether you can find any relationship to what he talks about and where the eye ball moves?

In my next blog article I tend to discuss more about these eye movements. 

Three greatest challenges being a Business Analyst

There are many challenges being a business analyst. The role evolved with the limitation that existed when technical competent personnel designing solutions with their captivated solutions driven approach. These personnel were more concerned with driving solutions that they know rather than focusing to understand customer’s actual business requirement.

#1 Promising the Impossible

As a Business Analyst we use a number of tools to analyze the customer requirements in detail. But at many times the main problem is that, Business Analysts not knowing the limitations or the capabilities of the proposed technology. Many projects are specific core technologies driven hence, when attempting to analyze requirements the business analysts need to understand the capabilities and limitations of the proposed technology. Many experienced business analysts would challenge this statement by stating that Business Analysts should focus only on the requirements and not the solutions. In the environment that we work on currently customers are eager to know how it will look and feel when they actually see the system, hence prototyping is a widely used requirement elaboration method. Thus demands Business Analysts to know the boundaries of the playground.

#2 Multiple Vendors

Multiple vendors are demanding document perfection day in and day out. In majority of the cases nowadays in projects requirements and development done by one vendor, quality assurance by another vendor.  Business analysts are constantly challenged with the understanding development team has and the quality assurance team has. It is extremely important to ensure that we attempt to eliminate the gap between the two teams. Although how perfect the documentation is there would be gaps in communications in the practical world and with the tough time lines we work nowadays. The method I adapt is have a look at the test plans and the test scenarios at a very high level. This will always help to assess how much the QA team has grasped from the requirements perspective.

#3 Stringent Timelines

Stringent timelines has become a part and parcel of the Business Analysts job. We are continuously pushed to complete work on impossible time lines resulting in probably compromises in quality of the work we do. To best way to manage difficult timelines is plan ahead. Business Analysts tasks also fall into a waterfall methodology where we wait till we finish the first task to proceed to the next. The method that I use is simultaneous documentation. While attempting to elicit, analyze and elaborate I start documentation. This not only helps to get the consent of the client while doing the requirement elicitation phase itself. After every meeting I ensure to send a lengthy meeting minutes with action items and the part of documentation completed for that session. This constantly gives opportunity to get feedback from the client.