Sephora’s recent biannual sale snafu carries two good lessons.

It may be time to rethink the mass drop model since serve scaling is expensive. Ticketmaster has been getting blasted for the same thing. But if you’re going to drop, at least have decent messaging ready for when things crash.

Maybe sales can become brand holidays instead of just accounting exercises. Sephora runs two sales a year and shoppers plan for them. They don’t need to align with a shopping holiday, they are a shopping holiday for the stans. And that’s much more valuable.

Generations are garbage but the rise of dupes amongst younger shoppers is probably a sign of mainstream shopping behavior to come.

“Dupes,” short for “duplicate,” are cheaper alternatives to premium or luxury consumer products

Inflation and rising interest rates has destroyed weak brand loyalty and could make it more common for people to buy a dupe as a proof of concept purchase before shelling out for the name brand version.

The OpenAI carnival did give us marketers an early holiday gift, a reminder:

In today’s world, the story matters. You’ll either tell your story or your story will get told for you.

Being able to tell your story before someone else tells it is so important.

Brands are stories.

Who is telling yours?

(Letting the customers tell it is not a bad thing, as long as their story matches yours (or is close enough))

Ah yes, of course. Makes total sense. Only logical end point.

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023

From Adweek:

Mobile and desktop ad-block rates are experiencing a gradual uptick, increasing by 11% in 2023 from 2021, according to ad-filtering tech firm Eyeo and its 2023 Ad-Filtering Report.

Buoyed by the work-from-home trend, the rate of ad blocking on desktops in the U.S. reached 27% by the end of the second quarter this year, according to the report by Eyeo. The ad-blocking rate on mobile phones is 22%.

This will increase the value of social and search advertising along with podcast (and audio more broadly), newsletter, and CTV ads.

YouTube ads are valuable when in-app.

If you don’t feel like spending your Thanksgiving arguing about gag orders or OpenAI or Fed rates, I got you covered.

Argue about how generations are garbage instead!

Long story short: they’re inexact buckets that have come to be used as shorthand.

From a marketing perspective: ditch generations as audience definitions and use actual words with actual meanings.

Do the work. Know your audience.

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I was getting ready to start a series of posts / resources about generations. What does each cohort gravitate towards, what are the preferred messaging mediums, etc. & so on, yada yada. All that fancy marketing speak.

But then, I read a headline (or a post (or something)). I don't think I gave too much thought at first, but it lodged itself in my brain (like all the good nuggets do), and it's stayed there. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was right.

I wish I could give credit to the person who wrote it. I wish I could actually put that piece here to see if it does the same to you. But I (clearly) don’t remember it. So we're stuck with my (likely warped) memory.

The core of the point it was making is:

Generations Are Garbage

Here are some other headlines that say the same thing.

Pew Research put together a piece on this topic. It's nice to see an entity basically calling themselves out on something like this.

5 things to keep in mind when you hear about Gen Z, Millennials, Boomers and other generations

It can be useful to talk about generations, but generational categories are not scientifically defined and labels can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification.

Pew Research CenterMichael Dimock

Let's run through the 5 things.

Generational categories are not scientifically defined

The cutoffs for generational divides are fuzzy, which is a red flag for something based on age ranges.

It's almost like some group made them up for their own purposes and then the concept spread like kudzu. Now it's just kind of everywhere.

Generational labels can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification

Said more clearly:

Generational labels can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification.

Let's revisit something I've mentioned here before:

The more we try to create an identity for a generational group ("all millennials are lazy snowflakes") the less we actually engage with the group and its subgroups.

Discussions about generation often focus on differences instead of similarities

We do want to figure out what makes different audiences, well, different. Try to determine what it is that makes one audience great (for us as marketers) and another not so great.

The not so great one is not our audience. That's fine. (In fact, it's great.) Our brand isn't for everyone.

Conventional views of generations can carry an upper-class bias

They use the example of Vietnam war protesters and how high profile college campus protests earned Baby Boomers the reputation of being anti-war. But if you looked at that age range as a whole, it appears they might have been more in favor of the war than older cohorts (who had lived through previous conflicts).

The popular storyline used to define a generation was based on high profile demonstrations from a subset of the age range (an upper class subset since it was college students).

Viewing things through elite-tinted lenses is an easy trap to fall into for media and marketing peeps.

People change over time

Wait, what?!

No duh.

That's the danger of generations as shorthand though. Once a reputation is assigned, it can be hard to let it go even when the people making up that generation have grown and changed and the shorthand is irrelevant.

Of course, there are plenty of differences between age groups.

But this isn't about "kids these days," this is about culture change.

Older cohorts are the status quo. Younger ones are change agents.

Rock and roll.

What Are We Really Trying To Accomplish With Generations in Marketing?

The more I think about it, the less sure I get.

Here's an example, I had a client say their audience is "affluent millennial parents".

I, of course, nodded along. Because it made sense. In the moment. The "affluent" and "parents" parts I get. But wait, what did they actually mean by "millennials"?

Do they just mean people of a certain age? Do they see millennials as a group that heavily uses Instagram and they believe that can be their primary channel? Is there a unique, broadly embraced aesthetic that aligns with your brand (all millennials love millennial pink)?

When you say "millennial" or "gen z" or "boomers," what are you actually trying to say?

If you sit down and you say, “our ideal customer is Gen Z,” does that just mean you want the young crew? You want the trendsetters? What is it that you're actually trying to communicate with these generational shorthands?

Because just saying a generation name as your target audience doesn't communicate anything.

TL;DR:

So generations are garbage (which is handy for me because it means I don't have to go through creating that whole series of posts).

Don't use generational shorthands to define your audiences.

Don't say "affluent millennial parents" say "parents—heavily female—aged 25-44 (prime birth ages) who shop A, B, C brands and are interested in X, Y, Z." Or something like that.

Do the work. Know your customer.

More ads in fewer places

According to research by Tinuiti, around 31% of U.S. adult consumers currently use ad blockers, a segment that’s been steadily growing over time.

In light of That OpenAI Thing, this was a timely post.

a reasonable consensus of experts on NPOs [non-profit organizations] agrees that their governance is generally abysmal

Speaking of abstraction, it’s partly why frequent flyer programs work so well amongst the business set. The cost is abstracted away from the beneficiary.

the genius part of this incentive is that the person who makes the flight choice enjoys the loyalty program benefits rather than the person who actually buys the ticket

An important rule for incentive design:

know who pays for the product and who enjoys the incentives

It’s not always the same person.

Pricing is an interesting practice

They determined that when the prices were listed with the dollar sign, customers spent less. Conversely, when the dollar sign was absent, they tended to spend more.

Putting on my hack consumer psychologist hat for a minute…

The dollar sign is a symbol that connects a number to the pieces of paper we think of as money.

The absence of that symbol allows the number to remain an abstract representation, just like the bits and bytes of digital finance.

This OpenAI stuff is a cluster.

The AI race is fast and furious right now. The board’s decision may be the equivalent of a massive in-season superstar trade in sports.

Microsoft could be poised to take the lead while OpenAI could become an also ran or small research shop.

Speaking of shopping looking different

Hyundai Says it Will Start Selling on Amazon

CarMax, Carvana, and the rest of the purveyors of no-haggle, online car buying appear to have worn down the industry enough.

Amazon might truly be The Everything Store™ soon.

Marketing 101

Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.

-Charlie Munger

Why do shoppers abandon their ecomm carts?

• Shipping costs (guilty! Sometimes it’s the only way to figure out how much shipping will cost.)
• Deal searching / price comparison (ecomm satisfies the game urge unlike brick-and-mortar, the hunt for deals can be half the fun)
• Waiting for a sale (shoppers have been conditioned to wait for a discount winback email or use their cart as a wish list)
• Squirrel! (they get distracted)
• Want to put eyes on the product before purchasing

Useful tidbit from The ‘Gram for those that don’t like being phished or hacked:

Emails from Instagram will only come from @mail.instagram.com

🤯

OpenAI announces leadership transition

The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors.

But what does this mean?

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

An audio ads study found that less is more when it comes to copy.

Cutting 10 words (per minute) leads to a:

• 1% increase in consumers scoring an ad as standing out
• .25% increase in web traffic

24 extra words in a 30-second audio ad lowers ad response by -27%

Less density = fewer messages = higher memorability

An ad with four messages will have message recall of only 24% to 43% of ads with just one message. The more messages an ad attempts to communicate, the lower the likelihood of a single message being communicated.

If you don’t know what you’re trying to say, how will your customers?