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  • More For Less For More

    In an interesting Harvard Business Review post by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja, the authors discuss an emerging trend. More for Less for More (M4L4M) is a strategy that places an emphasis on delivering more value for less cost for more people.

    More for More, the current approach taken by many Western firms, charges customers a hefty premium for often over-engineered products. Less for More is China’s low-cost strategy of creating stripped down products that cost less and manufacturing them on a large scale for global markets. Unlike these two approaches, M4L4M offers firms a new way to reconcile multiple, seemingly contradictory financial equations: deliver more experiential value to customers while simultaneously reducing the cost and delivering that value to a greater number of people.

    Entrepreneurs are learning to extract more value from limited resources. They are embracing creative mindsets practiced by resource-constraints to invent affordable and sustainable solutions that deliver more value to more people at less cost. As a forward-thinking business leader, what can you redesign within your organization to deliver more value at less cost for more customers? What are you doing to meet the needs of increasingly frugal but demanding customers in a world of scarcity?

    How about marketing? Are there new ways to communicate more for less for more? This is another time to consider direct mail.

  • E-Mail Open Rates

    This subject line, “Study: E-mail open and click-through rates up in Q4” from BtoB Magazine has us wondering, is this irrational exuberance? They seem to be ecstatic about open rates of emails being up in the fourth-quarter of last year to 22%, up from 20.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008. The study also found click-through rates were up marginally, from 5.8% to 5.9%.

    Can we step back and think about this? This means that 78% of the people on your treasured, valued, opt in list do not even open your message. So that means that 94.1% of those same loved customers or prospects are not going to your landing page, they are not engaging with you, they are not seeing your appealing message. For some reason we hear many people wanting to compare these metrics with response rates for direct mail. What is a positive response for mail? A sale! That would be revenue generated as a result of your customer or prospect receiving information from you.

    E-Mail has its place as a part of a larger strategy, but if it is your only method for reaching new customers or reactivating dormant customers, you may miss your potential.

  • Strengthen Your Brand

    Andrea Syverson recently asked some great questions for readers of Target Marketing Magazine.

    Questioning is the precursor to innovation. Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician and philosopher, said, “The ‘silly question’ is the first intimation of some totally new development.” After years of questioning, there really are no silly questions.

    Even Jerry Greenfield’s (of Ben & Jerry’s fame) lighthearted question, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” is one of utmost importance to its brand. Fun is an attribute at the top of Ben & Jerry’s brand and product fit charts. It is even a tab on the Web site.

    In 2003, Frederick F. Reichheld wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called “The One Number You Need to Grow.” His research showed if brands concentrated on improving just one measure, it should be the answer to this question asked of their customers: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

    Author James Thurber wrote, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” What other questions is your brand grappling with, or perhaps should be grappling with, these days?

    Try these steps to get things going:

    Create an Environment for Questions. First, do you cultivate a question-asking environment? Without the freedom to raise questions or question decisions appropriately, your brand may have a blind spot.

    Question to Build Loyalty. Secondly, can you handle the answers to tough questions? Many brands have solid customer loyalty programs in place. These are indeed important parts of retention strategies. But take a moment to turn that question around for your brand—just how loyal is your brand to your customers? What have you done for them lately?

    Listen Up. Thirdly, what are your customers’ pain points? What makes them mad, frustrated or just plain tired in relation to your product, service, category or overall brand experience? If you spend time uncovering these issues and then creatively addressing them, both your customers and your competitors will take note.

    There are many examples of product/service/experience rage out there. Are companies listening? Do they care?

    So, take some time to question your culture, your customers and your results.

  • Brand Experience Matters to Consumers More Than Loyalty Clubs

    In a recent message from the Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat, some 52% of people in a survey said their memberships in loyalty clubs (from credit cards, banks, and other companies) influence their buying decisions; but 54% said they’d give up their memberships if they had a negative product or service experience with a brand, according to the Chief Marketing Officer Council. The average U.S. household is enrolled in 14 loyalty and rewards programs.

    Can we help you strengthen your ties with your customers? Is there a way that we can help you strengthen your brand?

  • A College Student’s View of the Mail

    Loyola University student Andy Dorsey describes his feelings about personal postal mail in an opinion-editorial.

    “Sure, it’s cheaper and easier to e-mail people, but it’s just not the same. When you see an e-mail in your inbox, you probably dread the homework assignment, request to attend an event or at the very least, the obligation of composing a reply.

    Letters are different. Maybe many of my peers have never gotten a true letter in the mail, but it’s at once an exciting and human experience.  Texting may have the advantage of instant contact, but letters are physical pieces of paper prepared for your personal perusal. They are objects that have traveled from their hands to yours.”

    Using direct mail to reach, even the youngest consumers, is great way to stand out and send some genuine personal messages.

  • The Three Minute Rule

    Harvard Business Review recently posted an article by Anthony Tjan, CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball.

    He suggested that one way to know and understand customers better is by studying the broader context in which your customers use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after he uses your product or service.

    The examples included Thomson, a media and information provider, asking the questions about products provided to investment analysts with financial earnings data. Immediately after getting the data, a large number of analysts were painstakingly importing it into Excel and reformatting it. This observation led to developing a more seamless Excel plug-in feature. The result was an almost immediate and very significant uplift in sales.

    In a study of female drug store shoppers, a significant number of women picked up a disposable camera after putting newborn diapers into their shopping carts. Follow-up interviews confirmed that snap-happy moms were often new moms. Placing disposable diapers close to inexpensive disposable cameras furthered this purchase pattern and would not have otherwise been an intuitive merchandising or cross-selling strategy.

    In the book, Why We Buy, author Paco Underhill describes how shoppers who do not have a shopping basket or shopping cart go quickly to the checkout when their arms get full. A casual observer says that is obvious. A savvier approach might be to interview people in a checkout line with an armful of goods to ask where they were three minutes earlier and if they would have considered buying anything else if it hadn’t been so difficult to carry so many items. Underhill concludes that more establishments should consider putting shopping baskets in the middle of the store to keep customers in shopping mode longer (since research showed that few would go back to the front of the store to get a cart once engaged with shopping).

    These situations illustrate how easy it is to fall prey to narrow thinking. In the Thomson example, they thought of themselves as a data provider, though they were really part of a broader workflow solution. In the cross-selling and shopping-basket examples, the three-minute rule reminds us that rearranging the context of a shopping experience to better meet customer patterns can be extremely effective. Customers seek solutions, but it is likely that your offering is only part of one. The three-minute rule is a mechanism to see the bigger picture and adjacent opportunities.

    Are you thinking of what your customers are doing? Is there a way we can help you provide a more complete solution?

  • Pay It Forward

    Trendwatching.com posted an extract from The Globe and Mail discussing the trend of helping consumers “feel good”.

    “Paying it forward” is an old idea with new life lately. Many different major brands have launched promotional campaigns that blur the line between business and philanthropy.

    Benjamin Franklin pioneered the idea more than 200 years ago when he lent a colleague some money on the condition that it be repaid not to Franklin but to someone else in need. Franklin wrote at the time: “This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”

    Maybe the idea caught fire because news of Feel Good Ripples spread due to what Wharton School professor Jonah Berger calls “social contagion,” a mechanism by which consumers and media decide what to pass along. “People like to talk about what is surprising, remarkable and unexpected,” Berger says. “They also like to talk about what makes them look good. Self-interest is a big driver.”

    For more hedonistic brands, the experience has been mixed. Starbucks received some positive feedback in the mainstream press, but bloggers sniffed that the whole thing felt contrived. Starbucks customers reported feeling good about themselves when in 2006, news of a pay-it-forward phenomenon at Starbucks drive-throughs began to make the rounds. Customers pulled up to the window only to be told the driver ahead had already paid for their coffee. The cashier then asked if they would like to pay for the customer behind them. These chains of benevolent coffee purchases reportedly carried on unbroken for hours at a stretch (and still do, by some accounts). And that may be the real dividend from initiatives of this type. Berger’s assertion that acts of generosity are driven by self-interest may not be so cynical after all. In other words, if your company can make customers feel good–even in such an oblique fashion as facilitating their philanthropy–the customers are likely to transfer some of that goodwill back to your brand. That’s a “trick” of which Benjamin Franklin might have approved.

    Here is a random act of kindness: Dean’s Mailing is offering a free marketing consultation to your favorite charity. This is valued at over $250.00 and will help save money and increase response.

  • What does your brand stand for?

    Deliver Magazine provided some thought provoking questions for many organizations and their marketing teams.

    You spend hours crashing through strategy documents, pulling out nuggets of customer insights, determining differentiators in the industry and understanding what it is that makes your corporation unique. And in the end, you have a vision of who and what your company is about. It’s that vision that helps establish relationships with customers, win over prospects and get your company noticed in this increasingly chaotic and fragmented world.

    Then, after all of that strategic work, comes the execution part of the marketing plan and you decide to go digital. You send an e-mail — which looks just like any other e-mail in your best customer’s inbox.

    Oh, we know, you finely tune the colors to match your brand (despite the fact you can’t calibrate how that color appears on any one monitor) or you include photography and graphics (which don’t download until the users request them) or you include the all-important link to your heavily branded Web site (although fewer than 10 percent click through).

    So, maybe it’s not the optimum branding experience, but it’s cheap. Boy, is it cheap. And it’s efficient — you can reach hundreds of thousands, even millions in a single blast — and really, you’re getting the word out there.

    Then the economy picks up, but your sales don’t jump as much, and at the next marketing meeting, as you’re puzzling over the numbers, someone asks why your customers aren’t so loyal anymore. What’s happened to that great relationship your brand used to have with them? And there’s a lot of this and that around the table, mutterings about “empowered consumers” and “everything’s a commodity,” and the meeting rolls on. You shrug your shoulders and concentrate on the next campaign. There’s work to do.

    We understand. It’s not an uncommon problem. It’s just that, well, you could stand for something. You could put something in your customers’ hands, something branded. Imagine that: those finely tuned colors, the carefully selected images, the perfectly worded summation of what your brand is all about sitting right there in the hands of the people you most want to reach. It’s right there at their fingertips.

    And inside that package, something amazing — something they could never get digitally. A sample, a tchotchke for their desk, a magnet for the fridge, a baseball bat, a brick, a salami — who knows? Something that’s amazing and brilliant and relevant, just like your brand. A piece that says “Hey, I know you,” and reminds that customer why he or she came to you in the first place and what your brand is really all about.

    You could do that. But that’s direct mail, and some say that is old. No point in doing that, right?

  • The Hare and The Tortoise (or was it a snail)…

    A fable based on tomorrow’s thoughts…

    There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run, how many people he could reach in a single mouse click. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, (or maybe he was a snail) challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.

    Hare ran down the road for a while and then and paused to rest (on his analytical reports of 5 percent open rates and great return on investment because hey even if you make a few sales, sending all that email cost almost nothing). He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, “How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?”

    Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, “There is plenty of time to relax.” Or perhaps he decided go for a run on a treadmill, just for fun, staying in the same spot but moving furiously fast.

    Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.

    The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for Tortoise (or was it the snail), they woke up Hare or did they scare him to try a different tactic? Hare  began to run on the road again, but it was too late. Tortoise (or was it the snail) was over the finish line, he won and is winning customers, sales and profits.

    The moral of this story is the quick easy fast fix does not exist and the reality is that Slow and Steady direct mail also known as “snail mail” wins.

  • Advertising as Charity or Charity as Advertising?

    Trendwatching.com posted an extract from The Economist discussing a new trend by major advertisers: they are “doing good”.

    The 107 million Americans who tuned in to watch the Super Bowl on February 7th did not see any advertisements for Pepsi. Instead of spending $20m on a handful of 30-second spots, the firm decided to give that amount away. Under the slogan “Refresh Everything”, the Pepsi campaign asked the public to vote online for charities and community groups to receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. A few days before the game its arch-rival, Coca-Cola, was also bitten by a charitable bug. It promised to give $1 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America every time someone watched its Super Bowl ads on its Facebook page, up to a maximum of $250,000.

    Other recent examples include Chase Community Giving, in which small charities competed to win $5m in donations from JPMorgan Chase, and American Express and NBC Universal’s “Shine A Light” program, which awarded a grant of $100,000 to a small business chosen through its website.

    Marketing people say consumers are increasingly trying to do good as they spend. Research in 2008 by Cone, a brand consultancy, found that 79% of consumers would switch to a brand associated with a good cause, up from 66% in 1993, and that 38% have bought a product associated with a cause, compared with 20% in 1993. Rather than try to make products that can be marketed as ethical in their own right, such as “fair trade” goods, firms are increasingly trying to take an ordinary product and boost its moral credentials with what one marketing guru calls “embedded generosity”. The fad for online competitions to award the handouts also appeals to another trend, so-called “slacktivism”, whereby people are turning to the internet to give their consciences a boost without doing anything more onerous than clicking a mouse a few times.

    Do you want to try something like this on a local scale? What about using direct mail to lead your customers to support your favorite cause?