Question

Topic: Strategy

Marketing-speak - What Do You Think?

Posted by steven.alker on 4/13/2006 at 9:19 AM ET 500 Points
Hello Everyone

In today’s Daily Telegraph (A UK Newspaper with news in it, rather than stories about celebrities) there is an interesting article about our Millennium Dome – A £1Billion Government Folly which failed in it’s purpose (Whatever that was) in almost every conceivable way possible.

It is being renovated and re-branded by an entertainment company to give it a new purpose at a cost of £600Million. The exercise was described thus in the newspaper:

“In what may be the most challenging piece of "re-branding" since Royal Mail tried to reinvent itself as "Consignia" (before quietly reverting to its original name), the new tenants of the non-dome are trying to make a "clean break" from the building's somewhat chequered past.

"If you leave the name Dome in there, then people will just say 'here is the Dome', but this is a completely different iteration of the building," David Campbell, the president of AEG Europe, the company behind the effort, said yesterday. (For those not fluent in marketing-speak, an "iteration" is a word used as a synonym for a version, although more accurately it means a repetition, which is precisely the opposite of what Mr Campbell meant, or part of a computational process of trial and error, ditto).

"£600 million of investment has created a completely different structure," Mr Campbell said.
The word "dome" was being dropped because everything about the old building has been stripped out and it is to have a completely new, and very impressive, interior and the only thing left will be the outer shell.”

If you want to read the article in full, this is the DT’s website link:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/13/ndome13.xm...

Now, what do you make of the journalist’s take on “Marketing Speak”? It’s fun, but is it fair?

As a maths bod, I approve of the real definition of “Iteration” but is the synonymous use right - if you were the PR would you go for this term? The journalist has cleverly turned the tables by reference to the correct definition!

And do you think that it will succeed where the might of President Blair’s Government failed?

Come to think about it, has anyone outside the UK heard of “The Dome” fiasco.

I look forward to your views on this bold attempt at getting a white elephant to emulate Lazarus.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Frank Hurtte on 4/13/2006 at 9:54 AM Member
    I have never heard of your dome. But every community has its own version. Here it's the bridge to no where. In other communities it's the puny-muni etc.

    I don't take offense to the aside about "marketing speak". I personally try to use as simple of words as possible. I do this for two reasons: 1) as a matter of principle, and 2) because I am a lousy speller.

    I am really interested what the conversation will be on this topic.
    Frank Hurtte
  • Posted on 4/13/2006 at 12:32 PM Accepted
    Hi,

    I know the dome, I was working in London (scratching it together) when the government there banged out 1 billion pounds for it.

    Then the whole thing deflated in a large football gone leaking.

    And indeed the telegraph journalist is setting the rather cynical tone and he shouldn't.

    I think that O2 is at least trying to do something here and it should be said, endeavours like this take vision which clearly that journalist missing.

    Come to think of it, I'm actually surprised others didn't think of it first like Sir Richard Branson, he would be considered a candidate to do something with it wouldn't he?

    Or the guy from Red Bull, why not come up with indoor flying stunts.

    Dome or not, good for London to at least have some entrepreneurs that want to do something with the governments mishaps.

    As for the terminology used, in German there is a saying: "ist mir wurst" literally that means: "complete sausage to me"

    Journalist do have reputations and one just got made here.

    Cheers geezer,

    Wouter
  • Posted by djohnson on 4/13/2006 at 2:37 PM Accepted
    Clearly words mean different things in different cultures. When I first read the paragraph, I understood completely what Campbell meant. And here in the US, the word is used similarly, or at least it is in my peer group.

    The word iteration is not a marketing term though which proves how ignorant the author of this piece really is. Typical of most Daily Telegraph journalists, the author was trying to illustrate how smart he is and how dumb the rest of the world is. The first rule in journalism is not to editorialize unless you are writing an editorial which doesn't seem to be the case here.

    The other issue at hand is the fundamental lack of understanding most people have of what marketing really is. Even in marketing circles, marketing is defined differently. And, even worse, the word branding is often used as a synonym for marketing which is completely wrong.

    I think it is outstanding that a group of entrepreneurs have purchased the dome. I have no doubt that it will succeed because now there is an incentive to make a profit. I agree that dumping the name and the word dome is a prudent marketing decision, too. In this case, you certainly want to get as far away from the old brand as you can.

    I think the real challenge for the new owners is not the rebranding of the dome but scheduling venues that will attract enough people to make the place profitable. Certainly, having it as a prop in future James Bond movies wouldn't hurt either.

    This is just one American's view. Hope it helps.

    Thanks,
    Dave Johnson
    URL deleted by editor Please use Member Profile for this information.
  • Posted by telemoxie on 4/13/2006 at 5:48 PM Accepted
    Boy, I'm glad Dave Johnson chipped in... I didn't want to be the only one to say it, but I would personally be much more interested in who was performing, rather than whether a building is called a "dome" or not.

    To me, the biggest challenge might be to "get small" - e.g. 100 people in a crowded room looks like a successful event, but 100 people in the Superdome looks like a dismal failure. If I had spent my money to buy the place, I would work hard to create some small, intimate spaces within the NOTADOME so that the events seemed successful and packed, not empty.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 4/13/2006 at 8:34 PM Author
    Thanks for the responses thus far – I intend to take up some of the issues with the Telegraph on a number of fronts and your comments are extremely useful. And interesting – Randall, you are a rascal you know, but you can write my PR for me any time! For the record, I am an occasional contributor to Daily Telegraph Letters, mainly on the more humorous subjects.

    Here’s a bit of history about the dome for our non-UK friends. Sure enough Frank, we’ve got our bridges to nowhere too, there’s one in Glasgow, slap bang in the middle of the city!

    The dome was a millennium project, conceived by the last Conservative government and was intended to be iconic, a symbol of how Great, little old Britain could be in the new century. It was so ill thought out that the minister who announced the winning design could only describe what it was meant to be for in terms of the most abstract idealistic waffle. He had youngsters playing “Surf Ball” in a virtual reality environment, without ever getting round to telling everyone what Surf Ball was or even asking someone to invent it!

    Labour, in opposition condemned it as a waste of money, but once they won the 1997 election they adopted it with their usual statist big-government glee in order to have a monument to their aspirations and a venue where they could toady up to the glitterati in a massive launch party. It was late, over budget and when it opened tawdry in the extreme. It never fulfilled its inflated visitor targets and the idiots never got round to providing a transport system which could actually get people there and back - it has no public car park for example.

    Many people think that what really killed it off for the press was the fact that the opening party was so badly organised that the assorted great and the good of our newspaper industry were kept waiting in the cold for so long that by the time they got to their seats, the new years party was already over. From that moment on, it had about the worst press of any attraction in the UK, much of it deserved, but the intensity of the venom which Fleet Street poured onto it guaranteed that no matter how hard a succession of managements tried to transform it, that it could never succeed.

    And that’s the continuing problem. That article is about the most flattering I’ve seen and it does attempt to give some credit to AEG for taking on such a venture. It would appear however that old slights die very hard and the journalist couldn’t resist having a not-so-subtle dig at this attempt to make some use of the damned thing. It’s going to be around for another 20 to 30 years and if we can’t find a profitable use for it, it will continue to drain money at the rate of £50 million a year from the public purse.

    This is a particularly British problem – the press just love to build something up with the apparent aim of destroying it. Rather than applaud the courage of AEG, they damn it with faint praise. Marketing-speak is a derogatory term in the press, despite the fact that our marketing industry is one of the strongest in the world and that it is marketing which sells newspapers. OK you thought that it was headlines, but without the assistance of the marketing men in the circulation department, there would be fewer newspapers and poorer ones.

    Every attempt at re-branding is taken apart as a folly. Yes there have been spectacular cock-ups, where change is made for changes sake, but absolutely everything is reported with cynicism and ridicule. And that represents a problem.

    Djohnson and telemoxie rightly home in on the potential of this vast space being profitably used to create a world class venue, and so it should. But I would not like to be the promoter who puts on the first gig or show there. The might of the Fourth Estate will be ranged against them before, during and after and they will be willing it to fail – it makes for much better copy.

    This is where our marketing industry seems to fail spectacularly and I wonder why? They appear not to be able to get across the simple fact that their activities, from PR through to branding are a force for good rather than a cynical manipulation of a vulnerable population of 60 Million gullible idiots. The government hasn’t helped, with its record of duplicity and “Spin”

    Our own profession has sold its services to the government to the extent that what you read about a public endeavour is never what is really happening. Thus when a company is associated with a government project, they are tainted by the same assumption. Everything that AEG says is suspect, there has to be an ulterior motive, it’s all nasty profiteering at the tax-payers expense and no one has yet said sorry for getting our editors wet and cold!

    Woutkok’s comment about Richard Branson is very pertinent – I suspect that he wouldn’t go near a project which has had such a poisoned history because he is a master of calculating risk and getting a return on his investment. I think that AEG must be playing a long game, certainly a longer one than Sir Richard usually takes.

    That leaves me wondering why the Telegraph, which is a middle-right wing, conservative and business supporting newspaper consistently takes an extremely negative view on any re-branding exercise. O2 is a successful mobile phone company – they have supplied the sponsorship for the deal and they used to be called Cellnet. That re-branding was ridiculed at the time, and for the life of me I can’t understand why they changed the name to O2, but they did and I still can’t get a signal on their damned network at home, but that’s not a reason for me to widdle all over their publicity. AEG is a hugely successful American entertainment company but it is defined by the sinister sounding reference to its boss as a “Born Again Christian”

    So why is our press so hell bent on bashing any endeavour which tries to shake off a problematic past with a change of image along with a change of function, a different use and a change into a for-profit enterprise. It’s as though they don’t want things like this to succeed, and that’s irrational. But they are doing it!

    Please keep the observations coming

    Regards


    Steve

  • Posted by steven.alker on 4/19/2006 at 5:33 AM Author
    That’s six pieces of insight more than I had when I started this question and one decent joke which I’ll use in any case – it illustrates the problem the guy from AEG is facing if he speaks to the press like that.

    What is evolving out of this is a two strand argument. Firstly about the difficulties faced by marketers when they have to face up to their Janus-like friends / adversaries the press and secondly the way AEG seeks to portray what it is doing with the Dome. Sorry, AEG, the “Not a Dome any Longer, the O2”.

    The press are the friends and the witting or unwitting tools of marketing, but any journalist worth his salt will turn the message he receives to make a much better story out of it. We can’t blame them for that, its their job, and if the company representative uses impenetrable jargon like “Iteration” which can be deconstructed and turned to mean the opposite of what was intended, then one could say, the more fool them. The journalist could be accused of cynical manipulation, but hey – that’s their job too. We all enjoy making paradoxes out of statements, especially if it raises a giggle for the readers. Kent’s right on this point, we should leave the jargon inside the office, where it belongs. And even a passionate argument can backfire. The cynicism to which he refers infects the way we view the marketer in public. Portraying an argument with passion to your superiors or your subordinates is probably a requirement of keeping your job. To the outside world, unless we happen to agree with it, it is spin.

    The second strand, is what the company is doing with the Dome (Sorry, the O2). Douglas, Dave, Kent and Telemoxie (Another Dave) have, to my mind hit the nail on the head. As a product, the thing didn’t work, so the company are fixing it at an expense of £600M. Now that’s worth singing about. If they’d just come out which that fact, “AEG turns crock of Sh*t into crock of Gold!” then the Journo wouldn’t have had a line of attack. It seems that what you’ve all exposed is the failure of the company to focus on the positives and instead allow themselves to apologise for the past, which had nothing to do with them. I agree, this is not a rebranding and it appears to be a tactical error to allow it to be seen as such.

    I’m guessing, but the Telegraph would have had a problem poking holes in a press story which was about saving the public £xx Millions a year on mothballing a white elephant, spending £600 million on a new venue and stuffing “The Dome” in the process.

    And of course, Douglas is right – “The O2” (Come on-lets give the guys some credit!) is close to the 2012 Olympics Venue. Maybe no-one from AEG wanted to risk being associated with making a profit out of the Games. No one else does, do they? I think I’ll ask them.

    Thanks for the associations you have drawn here. This started as an exercise for interest only, I nearly put it into the “Just for Fun” category, but as I was writing the question, I realised that the issues might be more important than that. I’ll keep the question open for a couple of days longer – I think that most of us took a break over Easter so a bit of extra time may be sensible.

    Best wishes and I hope that you managed to have a pleasant holiday break.

    Steve


  • Posted on 4/22/2006 at 10:57 PM Accepted
    The longer this post goes on, the better it gets! At the risk of starting Revolutionary War II, I've got to say the following - this is all cultural.

    I've worked with enough professionals on both sides of the pond to know UK marketing/business people lean heavily in the cynical direction. If someone messes something up, there is almost no road to recovery. I always use the Consignia case study myself when someone asks me for a "bad" branding case, because I know the UK press refuses to let it go...ever.

    In the US, failure is almost welcomed. Vultures stand around waiting for someone to fail so they can snatch it up and take it to another level (sometimes easier than having to start a business from scratch - let someone else build it and frig it up first!).

    Look at Frank Quattrone - a big loser criminal one year ago - now being heralded as the second coming. Or how about SBC and ATT? ATT was the biggest kettle of poop going, so SBC buys them out and then CHANGES THE NAME OF THE COMPANY TO ATT !!!! The US press mocked it for about one day, then forgot about it.

    I really feel sorry for marketers in the UK, esp. those for 02/Dome 2. After all that construction money, they will have to spend twice as much marketing $ than necessary, and probably still come up short of revenue requirements.
  • Posted on 4/25/2006 at 9:21 AM Member
    Hi,

    The word iteration is not a marketing term. Typical of most Daily Telegraph journalists, the author was trying to illustrate how smart he is and how dumb the rest of the world is.

    The first rule in journalism is not to editorialize unless you are writing an editorial which doesn't seem to be the case here.
  • Posted on 4/26/2006 at 12:29 AM Member
    Hi kevin,

    I just want to assert that my intention was not to copy, but to re-assert the above viewpoint by djohnson. I will take care that i will always give the reference of the profs whenever i quote their viewpoints.

    Warm Regards
  • Posted by steven.alker on 4/26/2006 at 7:35 AM Author
    Hi Everyone

    Thanks for the comments and viewpoints you’ve given me on this question. It’s given me the start material I was looking for in order to commence an article on cynicism in the business press. It’s also given me a useful insight into how the serious press has taken against AEG whilst the Tabloid or Popular press hasn’t. Hasn’t bothered is more the case!

    Two points, Matt, you actually highlight the problem of talking about problems, even if it’s solving problems, the fact that you refer to them as a problem only makes the problem more problematic. Do I make myself clear! Don’t refer to it is probably better but that involves the tricky subject of not “Avoiding the Issue”. The latter is doable, the former just propels the speaker into a swamp of, er, problems.

    And Kevin, a key difference there. We are culturally different in that in the UK we trade off the misery which derives from failure, which is schadenfreude in any other language (!) The Yanks (God bless them) have the far healthier attitude of deciding to profit from failure. It would appear that we’d rather get a cheap laugh or a bit of a thrill out of it. Ad-infinitum.

    Lastly, let’s turn to Nitin’s contribution. I thought that it was just a slip of the finger, you know, cut and paste and then post and intend to add a comment and then forget and then accidentally post again, but lets let it rest at that. At a different level, there’s some level of plagiarism on this site as with all forum sites. I recognised one guy answering a question with a straight cut and paste from a Price Waterhouse Paper. Have a peek at Ritesh’s contribution on:

    https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=12596

    It’s good for a laugh – note though that it can pay off, Carrie closed the question and gave him some points! (She can’t read everything)

    Quoting is OK, but acknowledge it and do like Randall does, comment on the damned thing! Nitin! Don’t screw up, you are starting to contribute some really useful points and I look forward to hearing more from you.

    Thanks again for all your help. If anything develops as a result I’ll keep you posted, so leave the question alert on if you feel it to be worthwhile.

    Best wishes

    Steve Alker
    Unimax Solutions
  • Posted by steven.alker on 4/27/2006 at 4:29 PM Author
    Thanks again everyone, time to close out.

    Randall, I'm taking you at your word but it still seems a bit mean to give no points for a humorous comment even when I've been asked not to.

    Until the next question then!

    Regards


    Steve
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