My wife and I went along to a local San Franciso screening of Fresh a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a documentary film by Ana Sofia Joanes about the Fresh food movement - locally grown and harvested food (pic is my abysmal attempt to document the occasion with a cell phone camera).

My wife has become very involved with the Fresh, locally grown food movement out here on the West coast.  So naturally, by osmosis, so have I.  Well, to the extent that I eat everything she buys.  If truth be told though, I generally enjoy fresh, locally grown food a lot more than supermarket fare nowadays.

The screening of this movie was the first time I’d really seen a collection of Fresh ‘foodies’ all in one location.  A real eclectic bunch - everyone from your ‘farmer Joe” types to hip urban chic.

The screening was MC’d by a local food entrepreneur who is opening a ‘locally grown’ community restaurant in Berkeley.  He introduced the movie and filmmaker and also chaired the post screening panel.

The panel was an impressive mix of ‘fooderati’ with the main attraction being Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food.   The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great read and I would recommend it to anyone.  It was also, loosely, the basis for Fresh, the movie.

The whole ‘locally grown’ movement is a complicated one with many different strands.  At its heart though is the notion that you can’t build a sustainable food system based on the principles of the industrial revolution.  Economies of scale work for widgets, but not for tomatoes, or chickens, or beef, or fish.  As soon as you try to ‘manufacture’ these, you have to homogenize inputs and processes to such an extent that any components of the natural system Mother Nature perfected over millennia disappear.

That natural system is based on carefully calibrated feedback loops and symbiotic relationships.  Not the sort of things you find in chicken farms - where thousands of birds are kept alive through a combination of cruel mutilation and drugs.

The result, as Michael Pollan likes to say, is ‘there is no cheap food’.  To industrialize the food process means to introduce foreign agents (like antibiotics) to keep costs down and output high.  This results in lower and lower supermarket prices, but higher health costs as we all cope with diseases that were largely non-existent 100 years ago (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.).

I never really gave much thought to this until my wife (bless her) told me to look closely at the ingredients of the peanut butter I was eating.  As I was reading out the 20 different chemicals listed on the back, she told me that peanut butter is made from crushing peanuts and adding a bit of salt - why would you need anything else?  She was right.  The added ingredients are to make it taste a certain way and to keep you coming back for more.  Also to make it last longer on the shelf.

If you look at the vast majority of other processed foods, it’s the same story.  We’ve sacrificed natural form for convenience and taste.  And in the process, made huge sacrifices in our health.  Fixable, of course, by the benevolent pharmaceutical companies who have a pill for every condition (ok, that’s stretching the conspiracy side of the argument a bit, but it’s hard to ignore the modern trend of food that makes you sick and pills to fix the problem).

As I was sitting in the theatre and taking all of this in, it struck me what exactly this locally grown food movement is up against.  The combined might of industrial agriculture, big retail, and the drug companies.  That’s a pretty formidable set of opponents.

And the battle isn’t only over facts and figures, it’s to capture hearts and minds.  There is a long legacy of industrial food consumption in the US.  Long and treasured.  With some of the most cherished brands selling promises of homely goodness and holiday fun packaged in dangerous foods - Oreo Cookies, hotdogs, McDonald’s hamburgers, etc.

To destroy 50 to 70 years of brand equity is hard to do.  I don’t envy the their task.  But to win this battle, destroy it they must.

I’ve personally discovered that you can’t get half pregnant in this debate.  As you move your diet away from processed foods and wean yourself off junk, you can’t easily go back.  You body ends up rejecting the chemical tastes.  Your taste’s change entirely.  The thought of McDOnald’s, once the staple of my Friday nights, now makes me physically ill.

The locally grown food movement is drawing the battle lines for the next big conflict in corporate America - and this time it’s not just one industry in the firing line (as was the case with Tobacco), it’s multiple industries.  All supporting and sustaining the unsustainable industrial food chain.

So grab a chair, a bucket of locally grown organic popcorn, and watch the ride.  It will be an interesting one.

I think we’re all been in this situation - you are launching a new product, trying to sort out a new tactic, trying to understand a new market.  

You get some research and look at the numbers.  It seems that there is a definite opportunity among females.  They are normally 51% of the population but this idea/product/tactic seems to resonate with females way more - they are 60% of those who liked/love it!

Digging deeper you find that they are also slightly younger, maybe live in the Mid West, and have middle class incomes.  Before long you are writing a strategy document to target single white females in Chicago.  Giving them a name like ‘Mid West Care-Freers’ and basing a brand strategy around them.

But what happens to the 40% of males who like the product/idea/tactic?  Especially the slightly older married guy from Florida?  He’s a young at heart Mid Western girl just trying to break free?

In all seriousness, just how important is an idea/product/tactic that skews slightly anything?  It’s a difference, but is it a difference that matters?

I am prepared to argue ‘no’.  Small differences and ’skews’ (as we like to call them in consumer research) are a carry over from a time when we purchased media with the intent of wasting most of it.  If we knew females liked our idea, it was more efficient to find tons of females and inundate them with messaging than find the 40% of males who wanted to be just like that Mid Western girl.

These days great ideas spread.  They spread faster and connect better than ever in the past.  We’ve moved (are moving) to a world where it’s easier to find like-minded people than people who are ‘like’ each other.

That’s a profound difference.  It’s the essence of group construction and the impetus behind social media.

And it’s a difference that matters.

I stumbled across a post the other day by Scott Brinker, the President and CTO of ioninteractive.

Scott writes a really interesting blog call Chief Marketing Technologist - words that don’t typically, or haven’t typically, shared the same sentence.

He talks about ‘the most important choice’ in online marketing - between the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience.  He means you have to choose how granular your marketing efforts are.  Do you slice your audience up into tiny segments, each with some unique characteristic, and serve them a tailored message?  Or do you stick to one or two segments and deliver a far less fragmented communication?

The first comment I would make, and with all due respect to Scott, is that I don’t think you need to trade off the unity of your brand.  Brands are multidimensional to begin with.  Whether you like to use Brand Onions, Layers, Pillars, etc.  to conceptualize it, your brand is made up of a core belief and around that (or under it or above it) different manifestations of that belief (values, feelings, attributes).  

I think Scott is talking more about the effort you need to go to as an online Marketer to segment your communication efforts by targeting a few groups or a few hundred!  You don’t necessarily need to trade off your brand unity for this, nor should you, you just need to find manifestations of your brand’s core idea that work for these segments.

But before you even go down this road, I think there is another very important strategic choice - whether or not an individual in your market is made up of multiple segments themselves!

I was recently doing some work for a major national restaurant chain.  They had a traditional segmentation that divided the entire market into five or six groups.  Typical groups you would think of - the family oriented crowd, the sports bar crowd, etc.  The problem was that while these groups represented a dominant attitude for an individual, it was only one of many.  We discovered the ’sports bar’ enthusiast was eating out with his family on the weekend in a quiet and relaxed setting.  His ’sportiness’ was still there, it had just been overshadowed by a different set of needs - relaxing, quiet, family time.  Talking to the ’sports guy’ only about bar food and alcohol missed an entire other opportunity - family get-togethers.  One that happend to represent a GREATER proportion of his wallet.

I think there are lessons here for online marketers.  Especially because online tools are easily deployed for different needs.

Take Gmail for instance.  I use it both for work and personal email, but I use it slightly more for work.  If Google segmented me into a ‘work’ group it would miss an opportunity to sell me on personal tools.

it sounds simple when you put it like that. But most marketers shy away from defining their audience along overlapping need lines.  You are typically either in one segment or another, not both!

I’m not too sure how this idea changes Scott’s original representation of the trade-off.  In some ways it might make it easier.  Instead of focusing on the quirkiness of individuals, who all have traits that make them different, you just need to find out all the ways your product/service is being used/deployed. Consolidate your communications efforts around these different needs and allow individuals to float in and out.

The strategic question then becomes static segments versus dynamic need states?  

Who ever said marketing wasn’t complicated?

You don’t rarely come across examples of Microsoft’s marketing prowess, so when you do, it’s blog-worthy (at least to me).

I was looking around for the latest information on Windows Server 2008 and came across this. (if you click it might ask you to install Silverlight - this is MS’s latest web technology, similar to Flash but based on the .NET architecture so it’s pretty powerful).

If you can’t get to the link or can’t see it for some reason (probably making the whole thing a failure in your eyes), MS has taken ‘personification’ to a new level. The page is a cool animation of a robot called ‘IT 24/7′. It has links to information and videos about Windows Server 2008.

The brilliance is all in the imagery. Windows Server 2008 is all about lean, tough, easy to use, server software. The robot ‘personifies’ all of these traits. If you watch the videos it’s like an aerobics instructor on steroids. Running, jumping, ‘doing fitness classes in its downtime’. Its standing position on the load page looks like it is about to jump through the screen. It epitomizes ‘action’.

The targeting is spot on. Most IT guys play video games. Microsoft also has huge equity in this space with the Halo franchise. In fact, some of the load screens for the Silverlight page could almost be mistaken for Master Chief.

The message is clear. Everything is done on message. Information is easy to get to and most of the major topics regarding server software seem to be covered. They don’t waste time with ‘content’ for content’s sake. It’s like the anti ‘gorilla‘ spot. Yet both seem to work.

Overall, one of these rare occasions where it all just seems to click. It works for the audience, works for the brand and is both entertaining, informative and memorable. All the things it needs to be.

‘Pragmatically creative’ is how I would describe it - I am beginning to love that term.

However, I haven’t signed up for anything or found other ways that make it obvious how you can participate - other than the standard ‘download this desktop background’. So they get 10/10 for creative execution and strategy, but the jury’s out on the conversation/social media aspects of the campaign.

I couldn’t find 24/7s Facebook page - even though it’s kind of an obvious move.