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Category: Communications

  • Top Talent Will Out – Brand Power Is A Fine Thing

    Top Talent Will Out – Brand Power Is A Fine Thing

    I just received an e-mail promotion for Disney Institute corporate training and executive growth coaching – called “D-Thinking your Organization”. In keeping with the Disney brand of old, it’s professional, well-done, creative and deceptively simple. It shows an image of two executives (presumably) with large cardboard cartons on their head, sort of sparring in the hallway – ostensibly thinking “inside-the-box”.

    Disney execs have long been revered for their creativity and resourcefulness, and more importantly for instilling the company culture in their employees so deeply that it affects the rest of their lives in a very positive way. I’ve seen a couple of them speak and it’s mesmerizing to hear their stories of how their customer-oriented service-excessive culture affects the lives of employees and customers alike. Tremendous stories of how good-will on the part of one person in a very minor role in the company affects a customer in a profound way to the point where they become eternal evangelists for the brand. This is the nirvana all brand managers seek, and they have found it, achieved it, and kept it alive after the loss of the founder many years ago.

    The point is that the e-mail promotion, a medium that many so-called marketing gurus have determined is of limited value for corporate marketing due to saturation of the audience, lack of permanence and a host of other reasons, worked – it reached a potential customer, a qualified prospect (me) and got my attention to the point where I not only read the whole thing, but studied the image, analyzed the copy and the headline, and filed it rather than deleting it. So much for gurus.

    The Disney brand extends to every facet of their business, and promotion is no exception. They always manage to be tasteful, honest, transparent and relevant, while being effective in showing their creativity and expertise, in subtle, understated ways. When they undertake something, it’s done RIGHT. Occasionally that means they’re a little behind the curve in terms of time or adoption of technology, but when they get there, all the bugs are worked out, they maximize the medium’s potential, and put it to best use for their purposes. Kudos.

    If you want to see how effective your brand is, or test it to see if it’s functioning as well as Walt Disney’s, request my recent article, “Brand Assessment Tools You Can Use Today” in the comment box below and I’ll send you a copy if you leave me your e-mail address.

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  • E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    There was a time, not too long ago, where marketing pundits and other “experts” were saying that E-mail had run it’s course as a marketing media vehicle, that it was stale, that it’s open rate was too low, that the spam filters and firewalls had made it nearly impossible to get good results with e-mail marketing.

    Now those same pundits (of whom I was not one) are having to eat their words as major marketers are singing the praises of a well-crafted, simple e-mail to your hottest, most worked on lists. As usual, it’s the message, not the medium that counts, and a well-crafted effective anything will always beat the schlocky, hacky, abusive e-mail campaigns that desensitized audiences and killed response rates based on misuse and abuse of the medium and therefore the audience.

    As always, it comes down to personal approaches, real, workmanlike copy, free of typos, grammatical redundancy, slang and other silliness that kill credibility. E-mail is still mail, and it’s still sent to a single address, which means there’s a person on the other end. Simply write with that person in mind, on a one-to-one basis, and suddenly watch open rates soar, response rates double or triple, and sales shoot skyward.

    Never mind all the gimmicks, bells and whistles. I know of one marketer that sends out plain text stuff that nets him phenomenal response rates – not a photo to be seen, not even a logo, just good effective copy, real headlines that resonate with the audience – his secret? He writes to his Grandmother in his mind – if the offer is clear enough for her to understand, if the copy clean enough that she won’t cringe (Grandma was a Jr. High English teacher), if the intent clear enough and the benefits plain enough for her to like it, he’s got a winner. Yes, he primarily markets to an older audience – but these days unless you work for Disney, who doesn’t? Not a bad acid test – can your latest missive pass it?

    Keep it simple and keep it direct – speak to a specific person – if you personalize, be sure to get their name and gender correct, otherwise don’t bother. Nothing will kill response quicker than the feeling that you didn’t even care enough to send the right message – it’s like reading someone else’s mail, and it creeps people out.

    Keep the file small, keep the message simple – huge files still give viewers trouble, big images still get caught in spam filters and firewall screeners. The trend in design these days is to make the whole e-mail an image or series of images – and my browser is set to make me actually request these image files in order to view them – why make me work to see your information? It would have to be a heck of a headline to make me click three more times and wait for them to load, when I can simply hit “delete”.

    A well-researched list is still the key to success with E-mail. Most rented lists under perform, as e-mail addresses change more frequently than physical addresses. A self-selected list is best – based on a web login, or a previous response, or an inquiry, something you can verify and be sure is “opt-in” work very well – permission marketing is still king!

    Frequency is something you can debate all day, but suffice to say if you irritate your audience, your response will drop, and often less is more. I’d rather hear from you 4 times a year with relevant info than 8 or 12 times with fluff and nonsense. Save it for the good stuff, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to put together the mechanics of an e-mail, it might as well be a good one . . .

    Send me a copy of the worst e-mail you’ve received recently, and I’ll send it back to you with an analysis – FREE.

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  • Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    With the long holiday break just behind us, and if anything we’re all busier than before the break we took to help us relax, I stopped to ponder the value of doing nothing. Some of my best ideas have occurred when I was doing “nothing”. My mind was obviously active, but the body can be fairly inert and immobile, heart rate low, BP down, etc. What makes most people relax is the lack of stress, both good stress and bad stress. Bad stress is presented when there is a challenge presented for which there is no good solution. Good stress is what drives competition, performance, internal drive in search of praise or approval. Bad stress can do physical damage, good stress can drive new levels of achievement. Relaxation can be as simple as having nothing on the schedule for the next hour that is “required” of us.

    The conscious mind may be seemingly inert or inactive, but the subconscious portion is always churning, turning over the available data, mining the memory for connections, coincidences, angles and opportunities. Sometimes, driving the conscious thought pattern in a different direction can give the subconscious the room and resources to put more energy into solving the problem at hand. Not thinking about it can sometimes mean that you’re thinking harder about it, but in a different way, from a different direction.

    Creative endeavors can benefit from this type of approach as well, not just problem solving behavior. When presented with a new marketing challenge, sometimes it’s best to just absorb and the necessary data and see what shape it takes naturally, rather than force it. I’ve worked with several graphic designers and production creatives, who had a policy of not touching a piece of paper(in those days) or a computer mouse to start the project until three days after the project “began”, the initial assignments had been made and some of the preliminary research had yielded some initial results. This gave them time to let the information “percolate” for a few days, giving their subconscious mind time to study the challenge from a variety of angles. I’ve found the designers who employ this technique to almost universally bring something fresh, appropriate, useful and accurate to the table – often they hit a home run the first time out, rather than through evolution involving outside input.

    Doing nothing for some period gives us time to properly file the input presented during the day, assess it’s validity and value, maybe connect some of the pieces of data in a unique or different way. Many successful professionals swear by meditation for stress control and creative inspiration. Meditating forces you to stop everything else, calm yourself, clear your mind, focus on something amorphous or not relevant to the current challenge – precisely the same attributes as “doing nothing”. Maybe calling it meditation legitimizes doing nothing for workaholics? Whatever you call it, your mind needs time to rest, rejuvenate, recover from the daily assault of input from outside sources. Rest can be your sharpest tool for solving problems.

    Let’s take a few moments out this weekend, and take a few extra hours to “Do nothing”. You might find a few problems solved or that things look a bit more clear when you “come back”.

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  • Boss Got ADD? – It Might Be The Media’s Fault . . .

    Boss Got ADD? – It Might Be The Media’s Fault . . .

    Most people have what they think are busy lives, and most of us try to do as much during a given day as possible, to live up to expectations, either our own or someone else’s. That means we’ve figured out where we can cut a few corners and do more than one thing at once, like drive and hold a conversation on a cell phone. Some folks extend that to an extreme degree, adding feeding the kids, reading the paper, programming the nav, and more while driving, local laws and bans be damned – these folks are dangerous.

    At work, most people I know try to be as efficient with their time as possible, to maximize productivity, keep the powers that be happy, secure their position and keep on track. Some take this to an extreme as well, and the ones who suffer are their direct reports and subordinates. If you’ve ever had a boss that was trying to do too much at once, you know how much it drives employees to distraction, and the higher up the chain the ADD boss is, the more chaos they leave in their wake.

    I know of one boss that has reports clinging to every word, not out of extreme interest, but because he rarely ever finishes a sentence, and the object part of the sentence typically contains the “who” or the “what” of the directive at hand. Without it, no one knows what’s expected of them or who’s been assigned half the time. So they all have to listen to each directive to get the big picture, and then divvy up the work as they see fit since the “real” assignments are incomplete or incomprehensible. Ultimately everything gets done, but the time wasted figuring out what’s needed and who’s to do it is actually making the busy manager redundant. I know, there are lots of coping strategies and work-arounds that would work to curb, change or otherwise eliminate this problem. But the point is, the boss is so conflicted, consumed and otherwise easily distracted by new inputs, whether from other coworkers, colleagues, his boss or others, that he can’t stay on track long enough to function. Most of this comes as a response to a reactive culture. What I mean by that is the company culture is one of very high expectation in terms of level of service, both internal and external, to the point of mandated response times on e-mails and phone calls (ie, you must respond in some form to the sender of an e-mail within 2 hours of it’s origination). This type of thing typically evolves in response to a complaint at some point in the past, that people were not responding quickly enough to get their tasks completed in a timely fashion. The reason for the lack of response was never explored, but a policy was put in place to combat it, nonetheless.

    Under those circumstances, the ADD boss has trained himself to let go of what’s in front of him (ie the meeting in progress), and to return to the inbox, lest he miss something or not respond in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, his staff flounders, the meeting gains no momentum and nothing gets accomplished, yet at review time, the boss can say, “we held a meeting, told everyone what’s happening . . .”

    Sometimes, the ADD behavior is simply a response to media bombardment – the brain’s receptors get inundated with input from phones, e-mail, TV, the radio, music downloads, meeting reminders, other conversations, web pages and all the rest, and rebels by not lighting on any one media, including humans, for long enough to overload – it’s sort of like your computer skipping around from app to app to use the available processing power to best advantage, but slowing the entire machine down in the process. Small bites for limited amount of time, rather than longer, more focused attention to one thing at the expense of everything else. This makes the ADD boss “think” he’s getting things done, but it’s an illusion.

    Write in to tell us about your most rambunctious ADD boss . . .

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  • Good Customer Service MAKES Your Company Money

    Good Customer Service MAKES Your Company Money

    One of the hallmarks of a strong b-to-c company is the reputation of their customer service approach. Think how much the CS interaction defines the brand for customers. As an example, two companies highlight this clearly – L.L. Bean = Good! Comcast = Bad.

    Comcast may be delivering an outstanding, clear, signal over a vast network of installations, over 99% of the operating time – a competitively good product in many people’s eyes. But mention their name to a customer who’s had a problem, no matter how minor, that they tried to resolve over the phone, and they will inevitably bend your ear for an hour about how hard it was to communicate and get issues resolved quickly and effectively. Horror stories abound, and multiply daily.

    Now, mention L.L. Bean to a customer who’s tried to send something back, or return something to a retail outlet, and they will smile and say that it couldn’t have been easier, and they were nice about it. Bean ships globally to millions of customers a year, from a huge fulfillment facility with hundreds of different products, sizes, colors, styles and variations, leading to millions of pick-and-pack combinations for a given order. Inevitably mistakes occur, but it’s how they handle them that matters to customers. Their policy is that they will take returns of their merchandise and refund or replace, no questions asked. They LIVE that policy every day, and it shows.

    If your marketing department is working in concert with your customer service department as they should be, your company can harness the power of the CS relationship with customers to build your reputation, and polish your brand to it’s desired brilliance. If they’re not, you could be languishing in the basement with the likes of those who outsource their CS, ignore complaints, abuse customers, and lose revenue as a result.

    Customers will tell you some amazing things, about your own products, sometimes even come up with new uses for your products that you can use to market them! But you have to build in the mechanism for that information to find it’s way up to those who can use it.

    Good customer service starts with the ability to empower CS personnel to resolve problems immediately and effectively. The customer is not the enemy, but you’d be surprised how many CS depts treat them that way. It’s not about policy, its about people. They don’t have to be all sweetness and light, but they should be professional, reasonable, helpful and genuinely want to assist the customer. If the response they are trained to offer includes the words “our policy won’t allow for that” – rewrite the policy and retrain the whole crew – it’s defensive, it’s confrontational, its antithetical to “serving” the customer.

    Think how many evangelists you’d create if each and every customer interaction was a positive one. How many upsells, how much pass along, how many influencers would you create in the world if every time your company touched a customer, they came away better off for the effort. Think of the sales increase you’ll create, what that would do to the lifetime value of a customer! You can effectively take what is commonly treated as an overhead item and turn it into a profit center, with a few adjustments to the training, scripting and approach of your customer service team.

    Tell us your worst customer service stories, and we’ll share them and use them to help make better companies with them.

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  • Publish or Perish – By What Definition?

    Publish or Perish – By What Definition?

    In today’s social media-immersed, blogosphere saturated, media-driven, net savvy world, the nature of publishing has certainly changed. The very definition of publishing has changed as well – but is that a good thing?

    The Internet has provided the everyman a unique opportunity to broadcast their innermost thoughts to the world, no matter how inane or irrelevant, with no editing, correction or restraint. While this may seem freeing, in the end it has lead to a huge, nearly unnavigable mass of questionably valuable information.

    Now when researching a topic, you certainly have more information available and in a more convenient format – but is it valid, accurate, vetted and unbiased? Probably none of the above in most cases.

    This glut of information has given rise to some unique phenomenon as well – the speed with which urban legends develop and spread is breathtaking compared to just a decade ago. Viral information can be more damaging than real viruses, and travels faster, and with greater impact! Cyber-bullying is now an additional concern parent’s have to deal with, and the youth of today have diluted the accuracy, eloquence and power of their native English nearly to the point of unintelligability, in the interest of speed and convenience, holding true to an artificially-imposed brevity limit. Progress . . .?

    Internet publishing has some tremendous advantages, in speeding the exchange and sharing of scientific, philosophical, cultural, economic and ideological information. In the old days, when a book or magazine article was “published” in print, a whole host of scholarly, educated, experienced professionals read, fact-checked, edited, contributed to and proofed a work before it was released to the public. This may have slowed the release of information, but it gave the information a fighting chance to be at least passably accurate and honest.

    Today, most of those professionals have been rendered obsolete, and those skills are rolled up into a single individual – the author, right or wrong.

    What does all this have to do with marketing? Simply this: take care in assessing what you “put out there” to market your company, build your brand, promote your products – one false step not only travels faster than you can catch, but is permanent, residing in servers and living on hard drives around the world!

    Good luck all you nascent publishers out there!

    Be sure to pick up my published efforts, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – Amazon/CreateSpace can have it to you in a just a couple of days!

  • Think Twice Before You Hit Send

    Think Twice Before You Hit Send

    Everyone makes mistakes – I don’t care who you are in life, you’ve made a mistake or two along the way, it virtually unavoidable. In fact, making mistakes is often the hall mark of successful individuals – you learn more from making mistakes than from succeeding the first time out. The real trick is not only to learn from them, but also to avoid making them in future. Making the same mistake multiple times shows a lack of self-understanding, wondering why things go wrong as a result is the definition of insanity!

    One mistake I see many younger business associates make is to put something in writing and deliver it to a recipient before reading it and considering the impact on the recipient later. In the old days, if you had an unfortunate experience or got caught in some less than optimal circumstance, you could fire off a letter to the one who initiated this slight, real or imagined. This involved sitting down, composing the thought. Then you had to find a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp, and physically write the vehement tract in longhand, place it an envelope, seal it, stamp it, and post it. All this took time – time to consider, reconsider, and with that many steps, many chances to halt the process, and reduce or avoid the impending damage altogether. It took effort to vent on paper, and usually only the intended recipient got to see the result.

    Today, with the advent of e-mail, the opportunity for electronic lunacy looms large. Many people spend entire days tucked safely behind a computer terminal, reading, texting, tweeting, e-mailing, posting on social media sites – communicating to be sure, but communicating what? It’s now much easier to fire off a venomous missive at the drop of a hat, with no real editor involved, either internal or external. A few keystrokes, a few clicks of the mouse, and off it goes, wounding and excoriating all in it’s path. And, in true millennial fashion, once its out there, it stays there. It resides on at least two server drives, yours and theirs, as well as all the one’s in between, and can easily be forwarded, used as defacto evidence, either for the authorities or in an internal investigation. And, it carries with it an IP address that leads right back to you – no such thing as an anonymous e-mail hate letter.

    Even routine business correspondence sent to the wrong place or copied to the wrong address can cause trouble. A quick note to a co-worker about what a jerk the boss was in today’s meeting (a bad idea to begin with, never commit such things in writing, it will always be read by the wrong person eventually)can easily end up in the wrong hands with a simple click that’s a bit quick, thanks to automatic address lists, group e-mail, and a host of other technological corner-cutting to make our electronic lives even quicker and easier.

    To avoid all of this, there are three simple rules:

    1. Read all e-mail at least twice before sending, starting with the subject line, word by word, slowly and carefully.
    2. If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t write it in an e-mail, tweet, Facebook post or IM.
    3. Check all e-mail addresses carefully, and verify before hitting “send”

    Take a moment, think about what you’re writing, think about the impact it can have on other’s, and ask yourself what you would do and how you would feel if you received this message in your in-box. If there’s any way your message could be taken the wrong way, misconstrued, misinterpreted or taken the wrong way, edit, edit, edit. It’s free, it’s fast, and can save you hours of grief and tons of trouble later. 30 seconds of review now can save hours of explanation and hard feelings later, not a great bargain if you ignore it.

    Read before you hit send – the office life you save could be your own . . .!

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  • The Devil’s In The Details

    The Devil’s In The Details

    Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference in the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. I’m not talking about typos, color shifts, production problems etc. Those can be controlled and at some point there are enough eyes on the material that they will likely be found and corrected before too much damage is done, at least in the old days, before instant campaigns online became possible.

    Today it’s a little different, in that with speed comes a greater margin for error, often born of impatience. Get it out there, get it out there, no matter what the cost in accuracy or efficacy. The number of eyes on the materials has been greatly reduced, as the influence and assistance of outside vendors, editors, production artists, printers, mail shop workers, shippers, packagers, truck drivers, etc have been greatly reduced or eliminated. You can now “do it all yourself” and when the mistakes surface, you have only yourself to blame.

    The little things I’m talking about are those small details in the offer, those small production details like proportion and size relationships, and typography, and color selection, and all the other little elements that make up a successful mail campaign. Promo codes that work, addresses that are postal validated or permit numbers that are correct, phone numbers and web addresses that are accurate and that function correctly. And more importantly, concepts that actually sell the right product! You might think I’m exaggerating or embellishing for effect, but I kid you not, I’ve seen marketing pieces that appear to sell the wrong product. I mean wrong compared to the intent of the sponsoring organization. If you are a large manufacturer, and your product contains a licensed product or another branded ingredient under an specific arrangement, (like Laundry detergent with Fabreeze), you can stop reading here. That’s not what I mean.

    I’m talking about when the marketing team gets so involved in the details required to produce the piece, nobody has taken a step back and asked the critical question “What are we selling here?” Those little elements I mentioned above can indeed have a huge impact on the outcome of the campaign (think what could happen if you’ve got 4-5 sponsors or tests and each has a different promo code, and somehow the codes get shifted mid-way or they all lead the same place and don’t differentiate – your metrics are shot, you have no idea how to assign revenue, and your test is inconclusive and invalid – not a good day to be working in the marketing department). But if your focus of the campaign is off, you’ve fundamentally misdirected the audience’s attention, diluted the impact of your campaign, and wasted potentially a lot of money. When reading the copy, those first clues that the focus has shifted will likely emerge. If you get to the end of reading the raw copy, no images, no production, just words on paper, and you don’t feel motivated to find out how to get ahold of that product, start over.

    Laser-like focus is required for maximum results. Each word, phrase, image, element or choice should be selected and added because it enhances the power of the message, clarifies the intent of the piece, or aids functionality for the end-user to facilitate a sale. Editing is a subtractive technology. Good editors take the mass of information presented in the first or second draft, and selectively remove anything that doesn’t force the sale forward. What’s left should be crystal clear, high-impact, high-return marketing madness that drives sales through the roof.

    Once that’s achieved, test it, and mail, mail, mail!If you’ve thought it all through thoroughly, tracked all the leads, attended to every detail, checked every phone number, web address, promo code and list parameter, success is inevitable.

    The Devil’s in the details, so bold marketers, go forth and dance with the devil, knowing that solid preparation, pin-point focus, and data-driven logic are the weapons that help you control the dance!

    Write in your biggest snafu due to missing a small detail, we’d all love to hear about it and commiserate with you – hopefully it was long enough ago that you can now share a good laugh with all of us.

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  • Change Is Good

    Change Is Good

    Change is generally good, for a majority of the people, a majority of the time. However fear of the unknown often retards the advance of change, and after a few surprises, it’s easy to become change-averse and fearful of the outcome of any change in our lives.

    Many people have experienced a change in the last couple of years that can be the most disruptive of nearly all events in our lives – the loss of a job. This has been ranked up there with a death in the family in terms of negative feelings, depressive influence and life interruption. Those who’s livelihoods and lifestyle was most dependant upon that weekly income are those most profoundly affected, and those who were the least prepared, i.e. having no savings or cushion, were the one’s that felt the pinch most severely.

    Those that embraced the change, reassessed their situation in a realistic, fearless way, were able to use their strengths, and send their lives in a new, positive direction. Many started their own businesses, gaining control over their income, their lives and their schedule. Some found new careers through retraining, additional education or volunteering through other organizations that lead to a new position. Change managed and channeled is change for the better, activity takes away the fear and returns you to a position of control.

    In business, change has to be carefully managed through frequent, relevant communication, strong leadership, and transparent planning. The less employees fear, the more likely they are to embrace the new order and get with the program in a positive way.

    The economy has forced changes on virtually every business out there, and some have managed those changes with the least damage to employees and their bottom line, and come out stronger at the other end as a result. Other have employed a more drastic slash-and-burn tactics, and are now hunting for talent, hurting for cash, and have lost market share to their competitors who were ready to gear up for growth.

    Marketing is often the promoter and enactor, a catalyst for change – how our company looks to the world affects how we work internally, which drives process change. New marketing programs bring changes in business processes, like customer service, order fulfillment, purchasing, invoicing, vendor selection, even physical plant management and HR. That kind of broad ranging change can bring some heat to the marketing department, but if managed correctly, can lead to a stronger, more visible, more progressive company in the long-run.

    Communicate often, make it relevant, tell workers what’s going to be coming down the pike, give them time to process and absorb it, react to it, vent about it, and accept and embrace it – once people get comfortable with the new order, they’ll wonder how they did things any other way . . .

    Tell us your most fear inducing change story, and let us know how it turned out in the long run, what your company did badly, what it did well to manage the change. We’d love to hear from you . . .

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