Why do you stupid Americans make it so easy for the Hothead?

This wholesale bailing on Toyota as a country has got to stop!

First things first:

The fact that we all of a sudden buy American cars because Toyota has a massive recall is call for an examination of our complete process of capitalism.  GM up 14%.  Ford up 25%.  Toyota down 16%.  Whatever the numbers -… so, tell me, we RUN to the domestics we wouldn’t buy in November because Toyota stumbles?  This wreaks of NFL+NBA+MLB+Olympic Over-board American competitive overload.  The yanks don’t build em so hot – and that’s OK last year (and oh btw, we won’t buy them so much they’ll go bankrupt), but when the guys from across the Pacific stumble, we run into the streets to our nearest Chevy dealer?  C’mon!

Are we living in 1949?  The war is over.  Ike is coming on stage.  We hate the Japs.

Are you kidding me?

Toyota still builds a great car.  Have you seen the clips on mega-TV of Toyota City?  They BLEED Camrys. When’s the last time we had a good clip on TV of Detroit?  And don’t blame Toyota or other foreign jobs (as my dad would have called them).  Detroit sold us a bill of goods for more than  20 years, maybe 30 and Toyota is to blame for their demise?  You bought Toyotas and Nissans folks! Not the country of Chile!

In fact, their AMERICAN Toyota jobs will be effected if this recall continues beyond it’s apparent nadir.  You shouldn’t wish it so badly.  Toyota jobs mean mega-more in a 12% unemployment economy.

Let’s all take a breath and relax.  After all, we all know someone that gets into a 10 cent accident and it becomes a hundred-thousand dollar or million-dollar ordeal and if you listen to the media, they are saying it’s gonna be a bloodbath!  So, if some accelerator pedals stuck – or are sticking (and my mother-in-law could be a candidate with her crashed 08 Camry) – how many will result in death and dismemberment?   Probably 1%, maybe 2.  According to the folks that know the details, it will MAYBE kill a few folks.  MAYBE.  I’m sorry for those that may suffer but it’s not going to amount to much.

I remember when the crappy saddle gas tanks of the Chevy pickup trucks of yore (and of my teenage driving age) blew up daily.  I remember the Pinto.  And I can top that — I DROVE A PINTO!  We didn’t run FROM the Pinto.  We bought one!  The Pinto was an embarrassment for Ford, but they continued on just fine.

Transpo Secretary’s Lahood’s remarks today were uttered like a cranky old man says things to his college-aged daughter —  “Stop driving that thing and call Bubba to fix it before he goes to lunch!… and tell ‘em I sent cha!”.  But CNN + friends caught it as per usual and put it into rewind.  It was a stupid remark but please people.  RELAX.

Go down to your local Toyota guy, hopefully a great guy like Paul Lunsford at South Coast Toyota, and just get the damn thing fixed.  Slowly.  Smart.  Just like you drive Sunday mornings when I’m behind you on the way to Starbucks… like there’s no friggin rush.

Tell ‘em I sent cha.

Michael Pollan brings up many good points in his op-ed for the NYT.  Health care is costly mainly because we are a people spoiled on instant gratification and what the head of Johnson County Maryland’s Health Board called yesterday on NPR “an insatiable appetite for health care”.  We’re doctor junkies and it’s because we eat too much.

Political opines aside, it’s really true.  In fact, I’d go one further and say that if we could somehow stop purchases at fast food for one day a week (all closed Sundays just like Chik-fil-a), we’d probably see a dip in Diabetes, if not many other heart related maladies.  Roll that up into some guidelines as to where these places can build and you’d see more drops.  People plainly need to get out and exercise and eat half the calories they now intake.

When I began running as a hobby, I was amazed when I learned from a very astute coach (head of training for the LAPD) that the minimum daily caloric intake for someone like me running 30 miles a week was about 1500 calories.  Most of the rest? — Stored.  Wasted.  Never used.  Carried along until my body builds so many maladies I’m in City of Hope Cancer Center.

WASTEFUL NATION ::

The fast food nation — those that imbibe such empty calories on a daily if not many times a week basis — create more trash, more pollution and more food waste than other part of the food cycle.  For every meal that is served at fast food establishments (defined as those restaurants with cheap ingredients with no long-term value usually festooned with a 24 hour drive-thru), there are copious amounts of  trash that go along with the process, a gigantic amount of natural resources wasted, and of course the resulting health issues begin anew another cycle of discontent at hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices.  I am a trash Nazi and if you’re like me, you notice that what’s thrown out of cars in intersections is almost always fast food containers and bags.  People that eat this stuff litter more than any other group out there.  It’s true.  Fast food companies should pay the cities to clean up their mess.  If you’ve ever done a cleanup day for your local beach or town, you’ll also notice that cigarettes are the main ingredient in trash.  The municipalities have figured out a way to tax people for smoking.  Maybe we should do that for fast food eateries.

There’s no end in sight.  Since the economy has tanked, the places like McDonalds have seen an increase in sales.  What we don’t understand is that the savings is just a very small down payment on the resulting train wreck of health care issues.

I was recently conversing with a young man that was so in love with cruises.  You know — the big ships that leave Florida and provide 24/7 entertainment and 24/7 food.  He was amazed and delighted that, because he could try each and every option the massive buffet offered each hour, he could just “taste” different things on a whim.  He spoke of how everyone brings a plate back with one steak, one chicken, one fish, a bunch of lobster, and then everyone just nibbles a few bites here and there.  Average people in America — those that can cruise a week around the Caribbean for $500 — think they are Caligula.  Really.

When he was waxing on, my first thought bubble was of the MASSIVE amounts of trash bags being taken off that ship in port just full of 1/10th eaten food.  What a shame.  Is this what we’ve become?  A nation of overeating, bored out of our appetites kind of people?  It sure seems that way.  I’m not crying constantly for the unfed (which are an important part of this debate) but gosh, our place in the world sure would improve if we weren’t throwing away so much food.

I think Obama could prove his plan worthy if he added more work on helping American’s cut back on the things they really don’t love at all.  This is the shot in the arm health care needs.

An excerpt:

Twin Peaks

David Beim, a former banker who is now a professor at the Columbia Business School, has something to say for people who want to pin this whole thing on the banks.

He has a chart illustrating how much debt American citizens owe, how much we all owe — with our mortgages and credit cards — compared to the economy as a whole. For most of American history, that consumer debt level represented less than 50 percent of the total U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product.

And then …

“From 2000 to 2008, it’s almost a hockey stick. It just goes dramatically upward,” Beim says. “It hits 100 percent of GDP. That is to say, currently, consumers owe $13 trillion when GDP is $13 trillion. That is a ton.”

This has happened before. The chart shows two peaks when consumer debt levels equaled the GDP: One occurred in 2007, the other in 1929.

And that scares Beim…. MORE on the link.

Wouldn’t you love to know what Obama’s typing?

After watching every debate, being a member of both party’s email campaign, and looking over poll data as well as doing my own raw pre-polls among a varied cross-section of the American electorate, I believe Obama is going to win by more than 50 electoral votes and also carry CO, MO, and FL as swing states.  This post is not about any narrow emotionally driven issues.  This post examines how expert selling wins the day regardless of the product or service.

USE SIMPLE MARKETING

[first you must agree that we are being "sold" and "marketed" to by two people running for POTUS.  if you don't clearly understand what this means, check this link.]

To win in 2008, it comes down to simple marketing.  It comes down to using every good sales and marketing tactic and eschewing all the rest. Obama’s team understands this clearly.  The other does not.

One candidate – McCain – had us at hello (in 2000 especially) but lost us on the way to the alter. Mike Murphy said it again tonight [click on assessing the electorate]  –  The McCain brand is missing.  McCain used to attract a lot of mid-line moderates like me.  I remember wishing I was voting for him in 2000, not Bush. I didn’t predict anything that has happened in eight years except a war, but none the less, I really attracted to McCain’s “maverick-ness”.  Eight years have passed and he began with the old line Republican way of selling. That would work moderately fine if Bush hadn’t muddied those waters for good. They never imagined that the other brand (Obama) would be so sleek, so direct, or so razor efficient.

McCain isn’t capitalizing on what people want to see in a candidate today, especially now with the economic crises of 2008.  The timing couldn’t have been worse for an old-line candidate and people think it is fresh and exciting to see the workings of our technological worldspace effecting the election.  There is nothing wrong about fresh and exciting in a political election.  If your product is the new thing, then it has to have substance.  People find substance in Obama.  It may be liberal substance (perception), but it’s there none-the-less. I remember dog fights over the lifespan of Google back in the day.  People have been let down by McCain’s product which is related to Bush’s product no matter what one believes.

That said, when I saw Obama speak at the 2004 convention [via television], I was intrigued by the newness of it all.  I, like a lot of Americans, checked my list to go back to him later.  He wasn’t running at the time, and I was too busy worrying about throwing my vote away to Kerry or someone else.   The equivalent of Obama showing up in 2004 at a convention is the equivalent of a concept car at the Detroit Auto Show.  So many drivers and enthusiasts dream that the new concept will be on the road and in their driveway.  It was a great marketing bit to show a few Flash-bits of who he is: an Outlier with a different appeal from most of our candidates.

MORE GOOD TACTICS — STAYING WITH A WIN

McCain has depended on what worked in the past.  Differentiation is the call of today.  McCain says to himself that if he were to be more like Obama to capture conservative moderates, he wouldn’t be true to his ideals.  When he does this he works from a very stale playbook.  These playbooks probably worked for Reagan and they surely worked for Nixon.  Those two presidents, I believe, wouldn’t be electable today (having no pre-idea how they would govern of course).  Yes, it’s an MTV world, but truly today we call it a Flash-Bit society.

The information bits are getting tinier and smaller.  Since 2000 this has been true.  Clinton playing sax on Arsenio was the old version of this (“I’m like you!”) and today’s version of this how you can read Obama’s intent in the first two seconds of meeting him.  Those that “want to know more” (all voters of all parties) are actually trying to talk themselves out of something they already wanted and decided to do.  My belief is that there are really no “undecideds”. I know this from selling for 20 years.

DON’T HIDE YOUR PRODUCT’S SUCCESS AND VALUE

This I know to be true: When a person, country, small business, university, among a lot of other entities, are in real trouble, we fall back on our most treasured base thoughts of what’s comfortable and then work from there. I see why most of rural America will vote for McCain.  As slick (and I’ve heard some say that Obama is “too calm”) as Obama is, it’s all we learn in law school, B-school and Kindergarten.  I have met a billionaire or two and at least a hundred millionaires.  Most of them remind me of Obama (remember… McCain inherited his money through his wife for the most part).  Even the southern good-ol-boys I know act and behave more like Obama and are ready to hit me with their law school editorial prowess over their ah-shucks CEO leadership principals. Obama has done what most of American kids aspire to do — almost verbatim — but the rural and suburban crowd will ignore that. These same people won’t text their wives on their way home from work tonight either.  There is a sea-change and America is catching the bug of “blink-ing” their way to the polling place.  In other words, as many say they are undecided, it’s proven that they knew who they were voting for probably months, but maybe (like me) years ago.  The folks that don’t believe their blink (most of humans) go about waffling and worrying until election day and wind up doing what their brains micro-sliced eons before. KNOW THIS — your buyers already chose to buy with you long before you hit the middle of your pitch.

FOLLOW THE STRATEGY OF A WINNING SPORTS TEAM

Lots of good sports strategy was put into Obama’s campaign.  The second debate between O and Mc showed us how Obama said nothing new, kept it steady, and relied on not changing the game at all.  Any team about to win their division and go to the Superbowl as favorite, will play their junior guys and just keep it steady.   Keep it steady when you know you have the sale and don’t bring up anything new to be re-computed in your prospects findings.  If the competition re-jiggers a bid you are countering, re-affirm why your product or service is still the best.  WHATEVER you do, don’t go about reacting and matching.  You ultimately let your prospect down because you reveal that your deal is not solid.  Prospects and voters hate reactionary measures.

Without going on and on about Palin, I’d just say that was the last nail in Mc’s coffin and every Republican pundit has said so.  It was a direct ploy to get Hillary-like and it backfired after they let her out of the pen and onto CBS News.  If this was 1940, she wouldn’t even have been on radio OR tv after the party elders assessed her rough edges.  Repeating his bad strategies of lore, McCain took out his old fashioned notions of women and pandered.  I know women 70 and women 20 and they are angered by his choice and they are not liberals.  When selling, never assume that it’s one size fits all.  American voters shop at WalMart and these voters know that there are lots of different socks to choose from.  Generalization – how this move equates to most women — kills the deal.  Think about how your ex-wife instantly comes up with 10 reasons your new wife isn’t like her or as good as her.

DON’T HIDE FROM YOUR PRODUCT’S SHORTCOMINGS

Sure, what candidate hasn’t had a beer with a bad guy? Some go to church with them.  Some bank with them. Some negatives about what you sell are huge, some are small.  Obama did the thing most marketers don’t do — Sell through the negatives and positives as they are one in the same.

Most sellers are fearful and blatantly avoid the negatives and shortcomings.  It’s easy for them to sense your fear.  They find it harder to count on you if you leave your negatives on the side of the road.  No product fits all.  No candidate fits all.  Obama, as a smart marketer, illustrated this strategy.

BE STRATEGIC, NOT TACTICAL

In most political campaigns as big as a POTUS campaign, the leader usually stays on a strategic course.  But Obama defined this as his way early on.  Tactical campaigns are negative and usually try to expose the negative (as above).  This time, and thanks to the added benefit of a bad economy and a failed incumbent party, Obama stayed more with positive messages about his plan vs. talking about his opponent’s negatives.  Sure, he conjured them up, but it’s been proven not as much.

A seller that bad-mouth’s his competitor will fail. Often, your propsect has bought the competitor’s product before or may be a current customer.  Obama said to moderate Republicans that it is ok to swing his way, and you see them doing it all over the country.  The data is not out yet, but I doubt you’ll see many Kerry or Gore voters going the other way.

My upcoming post will hit on why Obama will win and that it’s primarily very good Marketing 101.  It will be down in the record books as much as Rove’s work was in 2000.  Plouffe has done a marvelous job of sales and marketing.  The Politico.com list of Palin’s wardrobe is part of that.

If your competition were driving into see your prospects in a limosine in this harsh economy, would you find that as a point to reveal to your prospect?  Of course you would.  Fear is one thing as a sales agent, but jealousy rules and trumps out all the rest.  We are a nation of jealous people.  Each and every stop light in LA is a 2 minute exercise in who’s Bimmer or Merc-sadies is better.  Take that to the heartland and any ol’ dress that wasn’t purchased at Ross is a downer-bummer.  I remember one lady interviewed by CNN at WalMart knew exactly how much Palin’s eye glasses cost and that “they cost more than she made in a week…”

The times are right for Obama and Plouffe and the marketing machine of jealousy and the poor house.  Thanks to our natural born greed it’s gonna work out for them.  It’s like ANY sale — TIMING.  Nothing more.

How’s your company’s timing?

Go to long-due prospects and give them a three-point written proposal as to why it’s prudent to sign now as opposed to never or later.

1. Say that your company is utilizing the last of it’s credit facilities to give new customers a chance to come aboard.
2. If your company is solvent and sound, offer that as a foundation for working with you instead of a shakier competitor.  If your competitors are big and scary, but solvent, then go after public company downers like boards of directors that will slash call centers and other support mechanisms Jan 1.  As much as I hate fear as a seller, now’s the time that it may be beneficial.
3. If you don’t already have it, put together a marketing sheet (1 page max) on the current big and important clients that have re-confirmed (this means not your old hack sheet with old testimonials — this is a fresh one pertaining to the new economy) their commitment to your company.  This may prove to be something that moves people to be with the better boat in rough waters.  “After all Mr. Prospect, would giant XYZ Widgets stick with us if they though they could do better in this buyer’s market?”

Go out and be creative and take out some of your oldest tricks.  As buyers do become more powerful just by the sheer amount of poor-mouthing that is guaranteed to occur soon, you need to be ready and give them things that have merit, value, and substance.  Just for a short time, quit all the lovey dovey fluff and get right to the point of your call.

Obama should be sleeping on the steps of Congress saying he won’t leave until a resolution is hammered out that is all win-win for the American people.  How many times in one’s career does this opportunity come about?  Look at how the war in Iraq and 9/11 have now been overshadowed by this debacle in Bush’s presidency.  This will ultimately define him.  He is taking 2 minute speeches here and there and trying to guide our country on something so dire, so important.

This is the time for one of the candidates to show their contrast to Bush.  It goes to show they may not be that different after all.  As much as I am ready for Obama’s change and/or new version of the old, I am surprised he didn’t kick into gear in the past few days.