davidpoulos.com

Category: Branding

Legacy VS Longevity – Brand Makes The Difference
Some brands seem to become well known, some nearly ubiquitous, in a short period of time, relatively speaking. Some businesses that have names that are around for decades and decades, and for generations, and their brand reach is only a few miles from their location with virtually no recognition beyond that, aside from existing customers, which only number in the hundreds. What makes the difference between the long-time brand, and the real legacy brand, that gains national exposure and stays in the forefront for years and years?

Clearly just sticking around for decades should count for something, right? Growing a business is not for the faint of heart, and it’s a lot of hard work over years to become established and known for what you do. Yet some seem to climb that mountain fairly quickly and become almost household names in just a short period, taking a large stake in market share for their category, while others simply continue day by day, seemingly doing a good job, gaining customers, but they never reach prominence either in their category or industry beyond the small local area.

The difference can likely be attributed to three factors:
- Paid or Earned Exposure – is there an advertising program on a large scale, is there some press and PR activity on the schedule, have you told the story to the media and let their network and their imagination do some work for you in spreading the word? If not, that may be a significant determiner of your reach and market share – someone once said that “a business that doesn’t advertise is like a nerd kissing a girl in the dark – you know it’s happening, but no one else knows you’re there.” Craft a credible, succinct brand story, and amplify it as far as wide as possible.
- Industry Participation – Are you a member in good standing of the business and professional trade associations that cover your vertical and your business activities? Are you active and engaged in those groups? If not you’re missing a huge opportunity. Those organizations not only represent you and the other members to the general public, but they allow you to be known within your industry as an expert, a specialist, a provider of solid standing and credible ability – they all publish multiple vehicles, from websites, to magazines and newsletters and blogs that can be used to showcase your business to industry colleagues.
- Differentiation – what is it that you do better, faster, cheaper, differently than your competitors? Do you use different or better procedures, superior materials, alternate parts or components, better product designs, respond to customers in a spectacular way, do you offer a full refund no questions asked no matter what? Free shipping on returns, multiple access points, 24/7 service, faster turnaround? Something gives you distance from your competitors. Use that to stand out from the pack, and spread the word nationally that you’re the one that can provide “X” when no other can.
With those three pillars in place, if the product is of good quality, if you’re telling the right people, at the right time, often enough to “stick” in their minds when purchasing time comes, then your brand should be established, and spread as far as you can push it out.

None of the three things listed above are terribly expensive, from a business standpoint. It is certainly possible to spend yourself into a sizeable hole on advertising that doesn’t work or that is misplaced, but there are scores of professionals out there to assist you in determining the appropriate spending levels and media selections so that this doesn’t happen. The industry participation is relatively inexpensive but can be time-consuming – almost always well worth the time to establish yourself as an industry player, which brings dividends for years. Differentiation is more an introspective exercise, and should be part of all your marketing planning, along with reiterating your brand characteristics and pillars of internal strength for the brand, to help keep the brand story consistent and on track over the years.

Are you a local presence, or a national brand on the rise? The choice is really yours to make . . .
July 14, 2016
Self-Branding: Keys to Making a Great First, Second and Third Impression On Prospects, Clients

Most professionals in a wide variety of industry verticals are aware that they need to create a positive impression when they meet a potential client or colleague. Service pros of all stripes have at least some understanding and self-awareness regarding the impression they leave people with upon first meeting. What many neglect however, is that branding is an ongoing activity, and that if you want to activate the positive impression you’ve created with that person or group, you need to keep providing evidence to reinforce this impression – that brand is yours to damage or degrade, and a few smart, conscious choices can help you provide reinforcement to that initial impression and enlarge upon it in a productive, actionable way.

Branding has much to do with consistency, and human beings by nature are rather arbitrary, although certain behaviors are potentially predictable. Behaving the same way, reacting in a similar way to certain inputs and stimuli, developing routines and habits that are simple and obvious are ways you can reassure those around you that you are dependable, reliable, solid and can be counted on to to be reasonable. This requires a level of maturity, self-control and self-awareness, but once mastered, you might be surprised how effective it can be. Something as simple as arriving at the office at the same time a majority of the time, if possible, lets people around you know that if they’re patient, you’ll arrive in time to assist them if they need it.

Work on picking a style of clothing that really works well for you, is comfortable for you and others around you, is appropriate for the situation, and still expresses your individuality. Steve Jobs locked onto a pair of dark jeans and a black mock turtleneck, and wore them constantly for years. Not only does it save you some time in the morning “deciding” what to wear, but it sends a consistent message that says “I’m reliable, and focused on behaving consistently with your expectations.”

Be honest, straightforward, transparent and ethical in your dealings with clients and colleagues. Trust is the core of every brand, and if there’s a hint of inauthenticity, people will pick up on it and shy away when given a choice. Authenticity is critical to those in more publicly-visible positions. If you represent the face of your company, it is absolutely critical that you be as authentic and direct as you can, to stay in keeping with the brand expectation of stakeholders everywhere. People will sense a false note, and equate it with hiding something or covering up.

Treat everyone equally. Be as egalitarian in your dealings with everyone in the building as you can be. Treat the maintenance workers and cleaning crews with the same respect and attention that you pay to the CEO or Chairman. A quick word to everyone carries an amazing amount of weight with everyone you encounter, and it makes you personal, approachable and memorable, because very few can pull it off consistently.

Every move you make, every meeting you attend, every memo you send out, can either work to build the brand or dilute it – the choice is really yours. If you’re someone who is consistently late for appointments, meetings and happy hours, when you start to show up on time, it actually builds the brand, as long as you can keep it up! The opposite is true if you’ve started off being the first to arrive and then slip into sauntering in at ten minutes after . . . If your emails win awards for brevity and succinct word choice, and later you start to elaborate some, it builds the brand, and lets you open yourself up a bit, makes you approachable. If you push out 800-word tomes regularly, when you shift to the short and sweet formula, it can be interpreted that you are upset or angry at the recipient, or don’t care to include them in your thinking.

Stay on point. Everyone has goals, but few write them down, and fewer revisit them, review and revise them regularly. When your actions start to drive you toward your goals, staying on point and on message will help you build and maintain momentum. It also helps you hone and maintain your core message consistently, which builds trust with stakeholders throughout the organization, both up and down the org chart.

Devising a personal brand can be a terrific springboard to career and personal success. It plays to others’ expectations and allows them to feel comfortable with you more quickly and completely. Some self-reflection, self-awareness, self-control and self-discipline will help you craft a brand that propels you forward almost effortlessly, and will be worth the effort and time it takes to do it “right”.

June 3, 2016
Brand Loyalty Is More Fragile Than You Think

Marketing and sales pros know that people don’t really buy features and benefits, they buy feelings and stories. Your brand (hopefully) tells your buying audience a compelling story, one that gets retold each time they interact with your brand, which makes them feel a certain way, under a variety of circumstances. For retailers this means that each time customers shop your store, whether brick and mortar or online, they have certain expectations of that experience, and if you don’t live up to them, you may be doing damage to your brand. This makes customer service a key component to brand loyalty.

I was speaking with a friend of ours the other day and we were comparing the stores where we buy wine. I buy at a small, boutique, one-off adult beverage emporium, one that specializes in having a large selection of micro-brews, and a strong selection of more esoteric Bourbons and Scotches, and a terrific selection of wines from around the world. She shops at a chain store, owned by a major grocery retailer, with a huge inventory of all the top brands, great pricing due to volume buys, and a no-frills approach to store design and displays.

The reason she was asking me where I buy is because she had recently experienced three separate instances of poor customer service by store sales staff. She swore that after three strikes, she would never patronize that store again. Her brand loyalty to that brand, which had been off-the-charts strong before, based on it’s affiliation with the larger grocery chain, had been eroded to zero in just three perceived poor incidences of inattentive, rude, or unpleasant behavior. The selection, pricing, hours, decor and layout hadn’t changed one bit, but her perception of the store and its contents changed dramatically, for the worse.

Now I’m pretty sure the large chain won’t really miss her business, and will likely never make positive changes to the sales staff’s training or behavior guidelines, probably because they will never know they have a problem, and she has no reason to tell them about it. But if you multiply her experience by a hundred, or several hundred, or several thousand chain-wide, you start to see some negative effects on the balance sheet. If you disappoint your target audience badly enough, or often enough, then your brand is no longer what it was.

Ongoing feedback from customers, becoming more customer-centric in your operations as well as your marketing, can help stem this downward spiral and if caught early enough can give you a start on reversing it. Some companies are acutely aware of this, and take great pains to listen carefully to their customers. This customer brand monitoring takes several forms – feedback cards, social media monitoring, ongoing survey research, continual customer service call monitoring and review, and a host of technological solutions that track and measure customer attitude and preferences.

One of the more diligent brands in this regard is Hilton. They religiously guard their premium brand, listening carefully to all customer feedback, and taking swift, effective steps to satisfy customer complaints. They do it so well that most complainers are turned into brand evangelists! They have an overwhelmingly positive customer rating in a variety of categories by organizations like J.D. Power, Zogby Analytics, and media outlet lists like MSN, List25, and Wall St. 24/7. They have realized that their customer interactions are a driving force in their brand loyalty, and take iron-clad, positive steps to protect it and bolster it with each customer experience they deliver.

The real message is that while a single customer may not contribute much to your bottom line on their own, the symptoms and actions that lead to that customer losing their loyalty to the brand need to be addressed before they “go viral” among your customers and degrade the brand. As Barney Fife once said, “we can’t have that kind of behavior, we gotta nip it in the bud” when you fail to deliver the highest level customer experience each and every time.

May 21, 2016
Make It All Consistent – -Brand Consistency Builds Strength, Awareness

There is a lot of talk and noise in the marketing interwebs regarding brand. At the base end of the spectrum, there are articles on what brand is, how to build a personal brand, and what brand is not. At the upper end, there are published studies on brand engagement and measurement thereof, brand strength and awareness linkages to sales, and other more esoteric subjects. What’s missing is one of the central themes on brand, that it is imperative that brand presentation and implementation must be consistent from instance to instance.

Consistency is the key to delivering on that brand promise, no matter where it is encountered, and particular care must be taken when the brand is licensed to third-party outlets or producers to maintain the quality and consistency of the brand, to maintain its integrity. The level of importance of consistency cannot be underestimated, to the point where any brand-related engagement of our firm starts with an implementation consistency test, starting with date of first use, and carrying out to current executions. We collect all available examples in every media we can find, lay them all out and physically compare them, to point out lapses in consistency, poor quality control, bad executions on the part of licensees, or off-brand knock-offs.

For retailers and product purveyors, this type of exercise can be especially helpful in spotting counterfeit goods. Often, the goods are closer to the real thing in quality and accuracy than the brand usage, which is often either misplaced, mounted upside down, the wrong color, reversed when none is allowed, or even misspelled, sometimes on purpose in an attempt to escape prosecution. Vigilance is key to keeping knock-offs out of the market place and diluting the power of the brand, so performing this exercise semi-annually can help keep the counterfeiters at bay.

Some brands are fanatics about consistent presentation, and some of that fanaticism is justified, especially for those firms operating globally, with a wide range of distant or disparate locations and decentralized operations. Coke-a-Cola is one who vigilantly protects its brand executions. They have a brand usage manual that runs over 200 pages, and covers every instance of usage you can imagine, from signage, to cups, to promotions on billboards, to television ads and internet posts on social media. This manual is translated into over 35 languages around the world, so there are no excuses by bottlers or licensees from Buford, AL to Bangladesh for misusing the Coke emblem. Coke has it’s own trademarked PMS color, described in the manual using three color selection systems used worldwide, and translated into other color systems like automobile paint and video reference color codes. Talk about thorough!

That kind of control definitely has advantages, especially when trying to spot fakes in the market place. Even if your usage is not that extensive or far flung, you should still exercise strong controls when the work goes out of house for other purposes, like sponsorship programs, charity visibility, translation into other languages, or implementations in unusual media, like apparel or textiles, or low-res print representations. Coarse screen values, RGB conversion, poor registration or low quality paper all conspire to make a mess of logos and brands in less than professional settings, and some care must be taken to guard against these aberrations. One may not do much damage at all, but over time, they can collectively do damage to the credibility of the brand, and the mistakes tend to end up in some unusual places, and as such, come back to haunt you at inopportune times.

You’ve worked hard to build a highly believable, credible, expressive and purposeful brand – don’t let poor execution consistency undo all your hard work!

May 6, 2016
When To Give The Customer A Quick In-And-Out

For those of you with less than pure thoughts, got ya! I don’t write on customer service issues very often, once or twice a year, and it usually has to do with how to treat them with respect, how to enhance their experience, or how to engage them more thoroughly and for longer. But sometimes, you just want to get in, get yer stuff and get out, and that’s not always a bad thing.

The thought of speed in a transaction is a foundation in certain sectors of brick and mortar retail – groceries, convenience, gasoline, and the like for instance. They aren’t large footprint locations, don’t have much room for folks to be roaming around, and studies have shown that they often are in a hurry or have a set list of things they need, and that total receipt won’t change much due to them lingering. They make up for this by providing a lot of opportunities for impulse buying while they have you the most captive – at the cash register. Some of these locations are so ardent about this, that they have arranged the items packed so closely together you can hardly see the cashier for the racks of stuff! But you can still get in, pick up your choices off of easily selectable shelves and quick-grab racks, get in a line (if there even is one) and pay inside of a couple of minutes, seemingly regardless of the number of items.

In that instance, that’s good customer service – you gave the customer exactly what they wanted – speed. Their expectations were met and you’ve given them exactly what they needed, a no-frills transactional approach to commerce without a lot of fuss or conversation. Some of this is possible due to technology – they have the fastest register software available and the simplest, most common-denominator pricing and indexing for inventory of anyone in the business of retail. But some of it has to do with design, layout, and most importantly, human behavior.

The reason people shop at convenience stores is exactly that – convenience. They don’t go bargain hunting, they don’t argue over the $3 mini bag of Cheeze Curlz, they don’t bring coupons (there aren’t any), and they often aren’t terribly loyal when it comes to brand. They’ll pay a premium for the speed and won’t argue about it with the cashier, who says as little as possible during the transaction. They’re not folksy, they’re not chatty, they don’t know you most of the time, and don’t plan on seeing you again, ever. No need to form a relationship, just bag the chips and the soft drink and move on.

That’s not to say that you feel rushed, or hurried, or that the service is brusk or rude, because its not. It’s just devoid of emotion, good, bad, or indifferent. They serve a function, do it well, and please the customer – job done. For the cashier, this is a relatively simple, boring to the point of inanity, potentially dangerous job, often on an odd shift, done for the short-term based on a dearth of marketable skills and a need for capital – it’s not a career position. For the customer, it’s a quick pit stop with a specific purpose, no browsing or emotion required, and if they happen to find something whimsical or amusing at the register, or something there reminds them of another item they need, so much the better for everyone – what the heck, it’s only two bucks, right?

Other types of retailers can benefit from this approach as well, specifically online. Everyone’s focus in the early days of web commerce was to extend “dwell time” – how long are they lingering on the site, what are they looking at, what page and what item draws their attention, were key metrics. Consumers were still getting used to shopping online, and there had yet to be developed standards of usability or code norms for websites, so the customer had to not only learn how to find the items they were looking for, but how to work the website in order to get them, from the shopping presentation matrix to the sizing and customizing of the item, to calculating the shipping time and cost, to the payments page(s), it was a learning experience, not so much a shopping experience.

More recently, shoppers have gotten vary familiar with all the bells and whistles of online commerce, web designers have figured out how to present non-static digital items for greatest effect, and how to lay out pages intuitively so that your eye and cursor travels to what you want almost effortlessly. It’s a strong advantage, and only recently have online shoppers been allowed the freedom to use their own data to speed the process along. For commerce sites you frequent, there is significant data from your prior transactions that allows both you and the retailer to benefit.

I frequent a couple of gift sites for things I send to clients for the holidays, and after a few years, I can visit them, select, buy, address and ship about 20 items in less than 30 minutes – blazing speed compared to a trip to a crowded mall, let alone the gift wrapping, boxing, shipping, and distribution time and cost. All the addresses are already there, my selections from last year and prior are logged, and it reminds me if, in my shopping haze, I duplicate a previous gift – nice feature for us oldsters. The shipping is often either included or free based on frequency and volume, and I know the quality and presentation are top notch with out having to investigate further – a quick in and out transaction that by no means diminishes the thoughtfulness of sending a gift to a loyal client.

Sometimes providing a great customer experience really means delivering on your brand promise, as long as it’s been accurately telegraphed ahead of time. I know the convenience store doesn’t have premium brands, I know their selection is rather limited to a certain type of merchandise, and I know that I’m not going to get a bargain, or be met at the door and asked if I’d like a sample of Chai latte while I shop, or that the cashier is going to gushingly ask if there’s “anything else she can do for me.” But I also know they’ll have what I need to get by, right now, and get me back out and on the road without having to do anything special, or even say a word. Sometimes, that’s a great experience!

March 31, 2016
Deep Branding Is The Real Thing . . . How To Achieve It And Keep It Thriving

There are an awful lot of misconceptions about what branding is, how branding works, what purpose it serves, how much time, money, and energy should be devoted toward brand and branding activities. We see it in our practice, usually from business owners whose job it is not to ponder such things at any depth, but to have enough grasp to understand when someone more informed uses the term in a meeting.

This isn’t new.

Ad agencies and their clients have been hosting a debate about branding activity for decades, usually to persuade their clients to increase their spend on TV and radio branding ads for their products, if for no other reason than the products brand was a multi-faceted one, which required a lot more work to encapsulate in a :30 spot, and it was easier to do several ads with different focus or messaging and run them all in series to get the job done.

Most purveyors of products or services have a sense of what brand is, from a rather shallow perspective – in their minds it involves logos, online buzz, color palette, some minor but repetitive messaging points, and that’s where their story ends. I contend, along with some other professionals, that the surface stuff that gets readily recognized as branding is just the tip of the iceberg.

Branding in our experience involves a showcase of authenticity, consistency, values, reliability of delivery, and transparency of presentation that transcends all the hype, the spin, the gloss, and is a set of characteristics at the root of why the company and its products work and perform as they do. The more the members of a given company live, breathe, work and display the characteristics of the firm as a whole, the more effective those branding efforts become. That level of authenticity can be achieved, but it requires a company-wide commitment to those same values, and a mind-set that allows each and every employee to deliver on that promise, no matter what it is, each and every day for each and every interaction with customers, vendors and others. That’s a pretty tall order for most companies, but look how successful those who achieve it can become.

Some great examples in a number of sectors include: L.L. Bean (who doesn’t know that their stuff is rugged and practical, but also can be returned over it’s life, no questions asked, no fuss, free), BMW (widely through of as at the peak of commercial automotive performance engineering for the masses) Harley-Davidson (tough, patriotic, ruggedly individual customers who have a passion for things mechanical and cool), Campbells (feel-good, inexpensive, but consistently healthy and sensible simple meals in a can), Clorox (when you want something white, clean, back to it’s basic elements, synonymous with bleach) and so on. It’s all about delivering something people desire consistently over years and holding that trust with the customer to deliver in a way that’s familiar.

For those in the know, branding isn’t a fad or a new buzzword – it’s a way of being. It’s not just the packaging, it’s what and how that package is delivered, time after time, to those who know and love it. To those with a slighter understanding of the idea, the buzz talk may be overwhelming, even tiresome, because their definition is so limited and they don’t see what all the fuss is about.

There are quite a few business tomes penned by quite informed and well-educated authors on the subject, but I won’t make any recommendations here as I would certainly run afoul of those I omitted. Suffice it to say that if you select a few of these to read in your spare time, you’ll come away with the clear idea that few have a clear idea of what it is, and how to maximize it’s value – the top practitioners of the art are the ones that really get it, and they’re too busy working to maintain and burnish their company’s brands to write books. Branding is still as much art as science, and those with an intuitive understanding of the art, with a gut sense of what their company’s brand represents will be the victor in the war for consumer mindshare.

February 24, 2016
Why Do So Many Super Bowl Ads Fail?
While they are still fresh in my mind, I wanted to work through my dismay at the quality and effectiveness of many of the ads run during the recent Super Bowl telecast. There’s a lot of chatter critiquing individual ads the day or two after they run, but I don’t see a lot of analysis about the craft in general and what it means for broadspectrum media marketing in general. I won’t speak directly to any single effort, or run down the list and comment, that’s been done to death. Here’s my take:
- Pressure – with :30 spots topping $1.5 million at the bottom end for TV time during the telecast, there is tremendous pressure to use that expensive time to best advantage, and to be memorable so people will talk about it the next day and beyond. However, being “memorable” for memory’s sake is a flawed tactic if the brand doesn’t already resonate, or the ad attempts to shift brand perception too far outside the limits of credibility.
- Dilution – the audience touted by the Super Bowl telecast is not only huge but is much more diverse than it used to be – that male 25-34 demo has been diluted significantly as parties, gatherings, and the halftime shows have broadened the audience to take in women, older men who remember the good old days, and twenty-somethings watching for the halftime shows. Whenever you have to play to that broad an audience, the tendency to pitch to the lowest common denominator is terribly great. By appealing to everyone, they don’t really appeal to anyone.
- Shock Value – in the past, the most unusual, the most shocking ads have been the ones that garnered the most attention, got the most buzz in days after their airing. Now, it’s a contest to see who is going to be the most shocking, the most outrageous, regardless of whether it actually moves the needle for recognition, or god forbid, sales. Shock for shock’s sake is great for slasher movies, not so great for advertising.
- Lack of Taste – as societies’ level of etiquette and civility toward its own members has declined, so has it’s need and desire to be tasteful. Who needs to be tasteful if it’s not going to be appreciated, right? So some of the more crass, tasteless ads often resonate with the younger, newer audience who are the next generation of both creatives and pundits, who have a different set of taste values than the older generation before them.
- Lack of Fundamentals – some of the ads are just bad because they don’t do the job we expect them to do. They may not have been intended to do the job traditional ads are crafted to do – sell product, or reinforce brand. Some of them are just there to make an impression for a short time – see number three – rather than reinforcing the brands behind them, the ads have become a product within themselves. Some are so bad at the traditional function, they functionally fail, as day-after polling repeatedly shows – you remember the ad but not the product or the company for whom they were made – kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Those are just a few of the reasons that for most of the core Super Bowl audience, many of the ads run during the game seem strange, bizarre, poor or just plain awful. The goal has become, “Hey, we need a Super Bowl ad” instead of “Hey, we need a new campaign, and by the way, the Super Bowl has a great audience that matches the demo we need to hit,” which has lead to the current crop of high-visibility, low-memorability, poorly identified spots that miss the mark on any other day, but on Super Sunday, they become darlings – for about 48 hours. Pretty expensive two days, if you ask me . . .
February 9, 2016
Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

There is a lot of buzz among marketers about fostering customer engagement, building engagement with apps and websites, creating communities with blogs and social selling. It all sounds great on paper, we should all work together, share your purchases socially, everybody knows everything you do, everyone’s on your side, we’re all a village, cumbaya . . . But when you’re standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart deciding what frozen dinner brand or dog food to buy, I don’t feel that my level of engagement with Purina’s website is the deciding factor. Marketing is about raising awareness in a positive way to influence and drive SALES. I can be as engaged as can be with a brand, but if a similar product is in front of me, and they are largely the same, engagement doesn’t trump quality, availability and price, and the sale will go to the one who fits those three criteria the closest. Even with B2B sales, I’ve been “engaged” with a number of websites and businesses prospecting my business via e-mail and other devices, but haven’t actually bought anything from any of them – I’d score really high on their “engagement scale” algorithm, but they haven’t made a dime off of me, and may never do so.

Brand engagement is a long-term play. It needs to be tied to other awareness vehicles, timed promotions, backup media, and ongoing evolution of product benefit awareness in order to really be effective at driving sales. This is not a new idea, but it’s one which has risen to prominence recently along with the ubiquity of social media platforms, which provide the ability for person-to-person communication in a way heretofore not possible on the current scale. I can now tell thousands of people what I’m doing, what I’m interested in, what I’m buying, what I’m eating, cooking, enjoying, drinking, and more on a moment’s notice in real time. That means that if I’m sharing it with others, it’s boosting their awareness as well as my own for a particular product, service or item. That kind of organic, exponential awareness spread at that speed was unheard of just 15 years ago. Epidemiologists are familiar with the concept, but marketers only recently began to apply it to their efforts – indeed the term “going viral” is borrowed from the disease spread specialists, as information, or awareness, can spread a lightning speed unseen from the outside, like a virus.

Just because I’m aware of a product or service that I’ve engaged with it on the Internet, does not mean that when the time comes I’m actually going to make a purchase. It may increase the odds some, but as we learned with the recent Powerball drawing, odds need to be changed significantly with a supreme effort in order to really affect the outcome. Social media engagement or website engagement is like buying 100 lottery tickets instead of one. It seems like you’ve boosted your chances of winning by 100 fold, but in reality, those other 99 tickets didn’t even move the needle.

By all means, do A/B testing, make adjustments, formulate campaigns that include a mechanism for increasing engagement, but depending upon it to drive significant revenue could be a mistake. The basics of building ongoing awareness through media your audience utilizes, timing your efforts to coincide with that target’s needs or life-stage position, matching your demographics and psychographics and messaging to that of the prospective customer, are still the linchpins of successful marketing efforts, and enhancements and refinements to these, along with some boosts in awareness through effective promotion of specialty offers, benefit driven messaging, and creative imagery, will drive revenue upward on a consistent basis as the brand evolves and the audience grows. If you’ve got all those bases covered effectively, engagement is a nice to have, the icing on the cake, and a good set up for the upsell and cross sell to that customer base, due to the added time allowed for an opportunity to develop.

Unless I miss my guess, the folks dwelling on engagement (which is notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy) don’t have all the basics in place and need a buzz word and a crutch to help them explain why things on the sales side aren’t moving as far or as fast as expected.

Dwell on the basics of marketing, make sure all the right pieces are in place and working together efficiently, and keeping the pipeline full, then worry about engagement.

February 4, 2016
Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

Think about it: Every meeting you attend outside your company, every business function you attend, every group you join, even casual encounters at sporting events, concerts, classes and athletic competitions like races and charity bike-a-thons, the one thing you can use to conveniently provide your contact info and your business “story” to a new acquaintance is your business card. It carries your company brand, it carries your professional reputation, your phone number, e-mail address, website URL, physical address, even a level of achievement and professional status – that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of card stock 2″ x 3.5″!

For small businesses, the many choices made in creating a business card are each vitally important to be sure it can carry all that weight effectively. Nice layout but thin, flimsy stock says I’m just starting but don’t have the resources to spring for the good stuff (sending a subliminal message that maybe I’m not concerned with other details of my company’s image, either). Standard white with black type might send the message that basic is good enough, I don’t care enough about appearances to even pay attention to subtle design cues and engagement that some color can create. Way colorful and “cartoony” might make it difficult for the recipient to grant your firm the importance and weight of consideration it deserves. Lots of type and images of you might come off as narcissistic if over done. Too “designy” might reduce the impression of seriousness and business acumen that goes behind your creative decisions. Type too small to read, too much information packed in illogical order, funny, multiple or odd type faces that make it difficult to read or absorb quickly, are all poor choices, and we’ve seen them all at one time or another. All these choices are critical to convey the message in just the right way that really makes you memorable, carries your brand effectively, and connects that person who receives it with the way you can somehow help them achieve their goals, no matter what they are. Like I said, a lot of pressure for a small scrap of paper . . .

With all that going on, it’s usually best to leave the design, layout, and production choices to a design professional who has a reasonable portfolio of business identity work. That doesn’t mean your new sister-in-law who just graduated from art school can’t take a crack at it, depending on what type of business you’re starting or promoting, but her input should be able to stand on it’s merits, not on her attendance at Thanksgiving dinner. There are basic design tenets that should be adhered to when crafting an effective business card (and other identity materials), but those tenets leave a huge margin open for creativity and ingenuity! Don’t feel boxed in by convention, just give due weight to the experience of those who are successful at creating these little buggers.

For the money, business cards can be your most effective weapon in the battle for recognition, growth, brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and professional networking success. Its certainly the oldest, and most valuable dollar for dollar. Sure, digital elements are global, changeable, adaptable, mobile and modern, but the lowly business card travels further, gets kept longer, is more portable and shareable, carries more information and meta-information, more memorable tactility, and more engagement than a web banner ad URL could hope for on its best day!

Next time someone hands you their business card (hopefully you asked for it first), take a moment and study it, feel it, read both sides, absorb it for a moment, then look up and connect all that information with the person in front of you. Does it all hang together, is it “as expected”, or is it in jarring contrast to the person, company or position you’ve encountered in the person you’ve been speaking with? That jarring disconnect is to be avoided at all cost, as it reduces that attachment, that engagement, that connection and memorability that are the card’s main job. If the card looks and feels just like you’d expect after speaking with the person for a few minutes, observing and listening to them, then its a winner, and carries that person’s brand, their status, their stature, their ethos and of course, the way to continue the conversation later, perfectly packaged in one small fragment of wood pulp. Not bad for a few bucks and some thought . . .

January 13, 2016
Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

Every business out there has probably been approached about a sponsorship, or included sponsorship in their marketing mix in one form or another, especially those with a consumer sales focus. But how do you make the selection of which one’s might be the most effective long-term?

Careful selection of the events, products, and people you sponsor will allow you to activate that sponsorship to benefit fully from your association. In order to make a beneficial selection, you have to know your brand inside and out, and have a good handle on some of the more “outlying” characteristics that consumers have pinned to it – not just the ones you’re broadcasting about it. Some of those alternative characteristics can make for very solid sponsorships if you pick them carefully and engage fully with all the opportunities they offer.

Many businesses don’t engage fully with the opportunities they do select, and get less-than-optimal returns as a result. This is one situation where you really do get out what you put in. Don’t stop at the logo on the sign, that’s just the beginning. Here’s ten ways to maximize the return on a sponsorship opportunity, planned or impromptu:

For Event Sponsorships:

10) Make sure to provide adequate materials to the event hosts so that all participants receive something from you at the event. Don’t short the count on the collateral, the promotional items or the literature, because that one person who gets left out will carry that impression longer and to more people than all the rest combined.

9) Be sure your brand is represented adequately, accurately and repeatedly. You’ve purchased a certain level of exposure, and most event organizers will bend over backward to help you get it, but if you don’t speak up and remind them, you may not get everything you were promised. Check everything to be sure the brand is represented in the best possible light, and that it’s reproduced at an adequate size, color fidelity and resolution to do you some good – after all, you paid for it.

8) Even if you don’t have something already created, make sure you take advantage of every portion of the sponsorship package. Most sponsorships are multi-faceted, and usually multi-media. If you don’t have elements in use already for each medium, be it flash video, print collateral, sales sheets, logo files in every possible format, bios, soundbites, banner ads, animated gifs, promotional blurbs and items, signage, banners, and other typical elements to take advantage of the whole package of opportunities, create whatever it is you’re missing. You might be the only one of the sponsors who does, in which case, guess who’s going to be the most memorable?

7) Make sure the audience matches your efforts. Most brands have a broad range of demographic, psycho-graphic and geographic audiences it serves. Be sure the sponsorship you pick reaches at least a viable, sizable niche slice of your total target market. If not, it doesn’t make sense to participate.

6) Make your selection based on LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE, and not just acquisition cost. It may cost you $25 to reach, influence and close a new customer to buy your product once. But if the event sponsorship is a valid one, you not only close one sale, but in most cases (if you’re doing your retention efforts correctly), you’ve gained a long-term customer who will enact or refer multiple sales over the next few years. Once you factor that in, the numbers on ROI work much better.

5) Do your part of participate in the success of the event. Your name and your brand is now attached to this event. Do you part to promote it, get some mileage of your own out of your participation, fill the stands and pack the seats – it‘s to your benefit, it drives that many more people to view your participation, and bring you more customers.

4) If the package doesn’t fit, ask for what you want. Most event organizers want the sponsorship to benefit you, so that you’ll repeat or extend your participation and become an evangelist for their event. They want to make you happy, and will negotiate in good faith if you have an alternative proposal to present. If you don’t ask, they won’t likely offer what you want. The tough part is accepting and using the valuations attached to each element. Most often it pays to just make the best overall deal you can, and work it to the fullest.

3) Pick events that make interaction logical. A mountain bike company sponsoring a swimming event doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that same company sponsoring an off-road bike race makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that you can’t sponsor an event outside your industry, you just have to be selective so that the audience can easily make the connection between your brand and the activity they‘re engaged in at the moment.

2) Make the sponsorship an integral part of your strategy, even if it isn’t. Plan your sponsorships to work with your product’s sales curve, either to boost the top or fill in the troughs, seasonally or geographically. If you’re expanding your service or delivery area, work events on the fringes of your current area to make the expansion more organic. If you sell primarily in the summer, work the earlier and earlier events, or later into the fall to extend your season and broaden your exposure.

l) Don’t select more sponsorships or pick more events than you can fully support. The up-front cost is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you add manpower hours, staff training, brand monitoring time, collateral and participation costs, and follow-up and activation costs, it’s easy to get overextended, and not give a full effort to anything, a recipe for failure. Make an honest commitment to the right mix of events and participate fully for the greatest benefit.

Making smart selections when choosing a sponsorship is a combination of art and science, and the basis is really knowing your market, knowing your brand intimately, and using some common sense with an audience perspective. Sponsorship can be a strong part of your marketing mix, if you make the right choices and work them to the fullest.

If you found these tips helpful and would like to read more, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

November 13, 2015