Tag Archive for Advertising

06 Apr 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Inexpensive Marketing Maneuvers

Forbes Magazine featured a story about some marketing ideas. Our favorite was to make your customer the star.

Using a classic cooperative strategy, you could create their marketing for them. If you provide services or products to other businesses, can you help them with creative marketing featuring your products. Do you sell framing materials to frame shops, create postcards featuring finished frames.

To feed egos of your customers, feature a few them enjoying your products and services. Make them look really good, help them say smart, witty things or touch on their vanity with great lighting, hair and makeup.

To draw your customers into your creative process, what about a creative writing, illustration or visual contest? The contest could be tied to something new like a product launch and the reward for submitting an entry could be a sample of the new product. Contests are also great opportunities for publicity and free media coverage. Since you really want to stay in touch with your current and past customers, sending them a postcard or letter explaining the contest accomplishes many goals at once.

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15 Mar 2010
Buying Behavior • Marketing Strategy

Feature the Flaw

Scott Anthony recently wrote a post for the Harvard Business Review on disruptive innovation.

Turning a flaw into a feature is a time honored tradition in the software industry. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” dates back at least to the mid-’80s. Turning bugs into features is also a critical skill of the would-be disruptive innovator.

The heart of disruptive innovation is the intentional trade-off — sacrificing raw performance in the name of simplicity, convenience, or affordability. The trick is finding the customer who embraces this trade-off because they consider existing solutions to be too expensive or too complicated.

In other words, disruption is almost always a strategic choice. Companies with a would-be disruption on their hands have to carefully consider their target customer.

Consider, for example, what would have happened if Procter & Gamble had tried to sell its Swiffer line of quick cleaning products to people obsessed with deep cleaning. Those consumers would have looked at a product designed to clean without sweating as inferior. In fact, Swiffer initially struggled in markets like Italy where consumers considered sweating an integral part of the cleaning process!

Instead, P&G sought customers who embraced simplicity, because often their choice wasn’t a deep clean or a quick clean, it was a quick clean or no clean at all. The “flaw” of light cleaning was a “feature” to the simplicity seekers.

Featuring the flaw often requires looking at markets in new ways and finding seemingly invisible customers. Some simple questions to use to guide thinking include:

  • What are the competitive alternatives to your idea?
  • Where are you better?
  • Where are you worse?
  • Are there people who consider existing alternatives out of reach?
  • Are there circumstances where using existing alternatives problematic?

The next time someone tells you to a fix a potential flaw in your idea, flip the problem on its head by seeking a customer that would consider the flaw a feature. Does this spark any ideas for your marketing? Is there something about your product or service that you can turn into a great feature?

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23 Feb 2010
Advertising • Direct Mail

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.

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22 Feb 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

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?

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16 Feb 2010
Advertising

Email & Texting or Marijuana?

BNET recently sent an email, the subject line read “Which Is Worse for Your Brain: Texting or Pot?” That is quite a question.

The post referred to a University of London study done for Hewlett-Packard that found that “infomania” — a term connected with addiction to email and texting — can lower your IQ by twice as much as smoking marijuana. Moreover, email can raise the levels of noradrenaline and dopamine in your brain by constantly introducing new stimuli into your day. When those levels get too high, complex thinking becomes more difficult, making it harder to make decisions and solve problems.

Read all your email and text messages, and your mind becomes so drained that it’s a challenge to get anything else done. Sure, some of it’s important — and that’s precisely the problem. “The brain hates uncertainty,” says David Rock, the CEO of Results Coaching Systems and author of “Your Brain at Work.” “It’s literally painful to not download your email the moment you arrive at your desk in the morning. But once you’ve processed 30 or 40 emails, you’ve ruined your brain chemistry for higher level tasks that are going to create value.”

In short, the brain’s capacity for decision-making was created for a time when people had less to think about. So now you have an excuse for not keeping up.

These are interesting facts to keep in mind as you plan communication with your customers and prospects. Maybe this is one more reason to think about direct mail?

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12 Feb 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Simple Sells

BNET recently shared this great post about simplicity. Marketers at Starbucks, Kraft, and Campbell have discovered that “simple” sells. Products that stress fewer ingredients – food, drinks, cosmetics, even pet food – are outselling rivals, as this USA Today story explains.

Is this a trend with traction? Will this “marketing megatrend” extend beyond consumable products? Leading consumers with creative marketing is one thing. Is ’simple’ something we should all be considering in our marketing, branding, and positioning? The answer to that is yes. Here are …

Five Reasons Why You Should Keep It Simple:

1. Communication. Regardless of whether your organization is Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Consumer (B2C), high-tech or high fashion or non-profit. When it comes to positioning, the simplest and easiest to understand way of getting across your unique value proposition (the reason why customers should buy from you and not your competitor) is always the best way.

2. We’re All Consumers. You, me, the CEO, even the seemingly unflappable finance and IT people. We’re all consumers and we’re all subject to mega-marketing trends that invade our subconscious day and night.

3. Stress and Overload. We’re all stressed-out on media, product, and “choice” overload. Too much choice can be a bad thing. We are all overloaded with media and product choices. Moreover, technology adds complexity that takes time to learn. It’s nice to have one less thing to analyze and worry about. “Simple” is calming, relaxing … for a change.

4. In Management and In Life, Keep It Simple. That simple rule goes a long way to explaining why Apple’s Mac continues to gain market share over PCs.

5. Left-Brain And Right-Brain Appeal. Emotionally, we associate “simple” with easy, quick, controlled. While we make left-brain decisions based on the perception of quality and performance, in many of those metrics – defects, moving parts, size and weight – less is more. These days we just want things to work the way they’re supposed to – no instructions, no drama, no returns.

Direct mail is a really great way to communicate “simple” in a clear-cut and easy to understand way. Call us at 602-272-2100 for some fresh ideas in graphic design or just let us mail your simple idea.

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08 Feb 2010
Advertising • Direct Mail

Television Ad Spending

Forrester Research released an excerpt of a study on TV Ad Spending and predicts that TV ad spending will grow by 1% to $69.5 billion in 2010. Forrester Research also released an excerpt of a study on Media Measurement stating that marketers can’t see value in multichannel marketing until they can measure it. TV spending is still the biggest expense for large companies, even as Internet usage increases and mass media audiences fragment. “65% of marketing leaders think Internet measurement is more useful than TV measurement.” Measurement of TV advertising and other media will become more like that of interactive marketing, and branding advertising and activities will be held to the stricter accountability of direct marketing.

Direct marketing’s measurability is the desired standard.

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05 Feb 2010
Advertising

A Tribute to Advertising

As we look forward to one of the occasions when we as a nation love to talk about advertising. What about these Super Bowl statistics courtesy of Moneywatch.com.

  • Cost of a 30-second advertisement during Super Bowl XLIV: $3 million
  • Increase in traffic to Super Bowl advertiser CareerBuilder on the day after 2009 game: 25%
  • Amount the Census Bureau is spending to air one 30-second 2010 Super Bowl ad: $2.5 million
  • Amount the Census Bureau has spent on Super Bowl advertising before 2010: $0
  • Per-person price of the three-day Tail-Great Super Bowl Package at the Trump Miami, including accommodation and one Super Bowl ticket: $4,500 per person
  • Estimated cost to South Florida of hosting Super Bowl XLIV, including increased police presence, clean-up, etc.: $8 million
  • Estimated benefit to South Florida, as measured by additional revenue to hotels, restaurants, and other spending: $353 million
  • Appreciation in ticket price since the first Super Bowl, in 1967: 22,225%
  • Compound annualized growth rate of ticket price: 13.4%
  • Appreciation in average U.S. home sale prices between 1967 and 2009, according to Census data: 999%
  • Compound annualized growth rate of home prices: 5.9%
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27 Jan 2010
Advertising • Direct Mail

Paper Mail?

Most of the information available to businesses and marketers is currently promoting “digital” communication. What about paper?

Paper can be touched and felt.

Print is persuasive. On paper, you can communicate at greater length (due to less eyestrain) and more depth – attention spans are longer for print.

Paper materials prompt action.  There are examples that printed pieces drive sales through other channels, including web sales.

Paper gets read when the recipient is in the mood, unlike emails, tweets, texts, or other updates which are usually read immediately or deleted.

To get through, to stand out, to get read rather than skimmed, to trigger orders, printed postal mail is still a great way to use marketing resources.

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25 Jan 2010
Advertising

Who Should Be Your Spokesperson?

In a prescient post by Harvard Business Publishing on November 19th of last year. They shared information gathered by an Adweek Media/ Harris Poll that found that among US adults 37% say business leaders, 21% say athletes, 18% say TV or movie stars, 14% say musicians, and 10% say former political figures, make the most persuasive ad pitchmen (or pitchwomen).

Maybe you, as a leader of your company, would make a great spokesperson?

Call us 602-272-2100 to talk to us about some ideas to implement this in your next direct mail piece.

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