davidpoulos.com

Category: Marketing Cures

  • Why Do So Many Super Bowl Ads Fail?

    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 . . .

  • Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

    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.

  • Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

    Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

    The world of marketing is fraught with data, we’re drowning in it, awash in a sea of numbers, statistics, charts, graphs, analytic dashboards keeping track of minutia that has little bearing on the bigger picture of framing and positioning the thing we’re marketing in it’s best possible light to the best possible audience. What was once about words, pictures, images, headlines, ideas, insights and engagement has been reduced to a series of tactical, digital zig zags, trying to maximize return on a micro level, and hope it scales up and moves the corporate revenue needle.

    Why?

    Do It Yourself

    One of the reasons that data has become so powerful (it always was, we just didn’t think it was cool to talk about it) is that not only is there a lot of it, but it’s easier to obtain and derive, and the costs are much lower, thanks to the Internet. In the bad old days, if you wanted to measure engagement or response, you had sales numbers (conversion), inbound phone call numbers (inquiry, “likes”), or account rep activity (lead gen inbound). Other than those in-house numbers, if you wanted to know more, you needed to dig much deeper, create a research study, engage a firm and have them do what they do and report back.

    Today, all the activity data, engagement activity, views, likes, dwell time, clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement signal are logged, categorized, organized and reported to you digitally on a minute-by-minute basis in real time, using inexpensive or free software. And it can all be accessed by anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

    Prove It . . .

    One other reason all this craziness over data is occurring is more corporate and has to do with economics. The marketing department has long been viewed as an expense, occasionally by the more enlightened as an investment, but only recently as having the potential to be a profit center. Marketers have always had the need to justify their existence pressed upon them, and we spend hours writing reports, dissecting response numbers and finding ways to make it look like the things we’re doing contribute directly to the company’s revenue and well-being. On some level, the more data we can present, the more attractive a case we can make for being provided, and spending, more money to do the things we know we need to do, but have to prove it to everyone else.

    In the real world, using data to gauge performance, learning and improving returns, and making decisions based on data is really the main idea – but we’ve been doing that for years. The real trick is to properly select and vet the data you’re looking at and using to make those decisions. Just because a number represents a count of a certain behavior or response doesn’t make it a viable or useful piece of data – it may not scale, it may not apply across platforms or audiences, it may not be sustainable, it may be badly skewed by events you have no control over. But it is data, and therefore useful, right?

    The other pitfall to all this data is that even if it is accurate, correct, vetted and sustainable, you need to find a way to convert that data to insight, and that insight into an action plan. You have to use the data to further the cause. Most data will tell you something on it’s own, but its not enough to go the distance. You need to step back, see the larger picture, put the data in context with other inputs you have proven already, and see if it flies.

    Lies, Lies, All Lies!

    Now we come to the lies part. Numbers and statistics can be manipulated to indicate almost any point of view, the insight comes in the interpretation. Averages tend to dilute or blunt insight, rather than amplify it. Statisticians have all sorts of tricks and formulas to manipulate data so that it can tell virtually any story you want – it’s all in the spin, how it’s presented. Even something as simple as college rankings, a long standing measure of the potential for success in leveraging education and brand to elevate one’s position in life in the long term, can be easily manipulated by marketers to tell a story that promotes the cause. If a college has slipped in the rankings from number three to number seven, is that slide an anomaly, is it due to something short term or environment that will reverse it self when conditions change? Even though that could be seen to represent a significant slide, it’s a virtual certainty that recruiters will be touting it as a “Top 10” college for years to come following the slide, hoping that nobody looks too closely at where within that top ten it falls.

    Use It Right

    The best use of all this data is to gain a clear understanding of the current position and level of success of your marketing efforts, establish a base line, relate it to growth, profitability, revenue growth, reach, market share or other commonly regarded metric, in order to use that baseline as a starting point for improvement going forward. If that happens, justification of added spending will be easily achieved, as activity can now be tied directly to results that impact everyone. Clicks and likes don’t pay the light bill or match the retirement funds, but if you can use data to show how you’re moving the needle, use it to improve performance by looking at the “right” metric, and make good decisions based on a few key data points, then that’s all the data you really need . . .

  • Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

    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 . . .

  • Thinking IS Doing . . . Build More Contemplative Time Into Your Marketing for Increased Effectiveness

    Thinking IS Doing . . . Build More Contemplative Time Into Your Marketing for Increased Effectiveness

    Lists – tick lists, To-Do lists, task lists, chores, check lists – successful people of all types and stripes are driven by lists, either as a way of measuring success, or of keeping your day, week, month, company, on track and focused on moving forward without forgetting anything. But what if we could spend less time focusing on knocking tasks off of a list and more time contemplating the more broad strokes of what marketing is about and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Would spending more time thinking and less time doing actually improve our results?

    In a word – yes!

    Studies coming out of Stanford, MIT, and University of Wisconsin indicate that deep meditation can actually change the physical structure and chemical behavior of the brain long term. Studies of gamma synchrony, the fast-firing of neurons in the brain that lead to a feeling of enlightenment or well-being, have shown that those who meditate or contemplate deeply and regularly can trigger this synchrony, which has also been associated with increased mental ability in in higher mathematics, enhanced creativity, at will through meditative techniques.

    That’s great, but what does that have to do with Marketing?

    Everything, if you think about it. A large portion of what the majority of people feel is marketing activity involves doing. Doing campaigns, researching and data gathering, hunting for lists, selecting images, writing and editing headlines, press releases and collateral, producing ads, commercials and websites – all doing. But those in the know have figured out that the big bucks really come in when you get paid for what you think, not what you do. Doing is the logical extension and the expression of thinking. They don’t call it doing leadership, it’s called thought-leadership, and for good reason. Taking time to think deeply about a subject or about a concept, idea, product, or technique leads to ways to express those ideas and thoughts in a way that influences others to see things your way – it’s the essence of marketing!

    How much more successful might you be if you took an hour, or even thirty minutes, to do nothing else but think through your next campaign strategy, or to contemplate possible uses for your product, or think deeply about the customer experience you’re creating for buyers? Most of us are so busy doing, we don’t take time to  think deeply about the actual purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish, of the consequences and ramifications of our actions, or how they affect others, or how they can be improved.

    Deep thought, contemplation, and the training to focus those energies on a single element of our work, to trigger those fast-firing neurons and reach an altered consciousness state that can deliver new insights could be the most powerful tool in the arsenal, but most don’t know it exists, let alone take the time to stop doing, and learn how to use it to their advantage. I know, it all sounds a little geeky and a little off base from the central tenets of marketing, which typically are all about the “do” – but if a half hour spent thinking can improve your insights, and therefore your success rate, by even 20%, I’d say that the most valuable 30 minutes you’ll spend all week!

    For a list of topics that should be contemplated at greater length, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

  • 5 Things To Watch For In 2016

    5 Things To Watch For In 2016

    I don’t normally do predictions and prognostications about the future, because even the most informed and engaged “futurists” are at least half wrong on a terrific day. If you go back and review their predictions with 10 years of hindsight, usually they were either dead wrong – not good for career development as a futurist – or the predictions now, in hindsight, seem rather vague or are broad enough to be interpreted in a number of ways, one of which might be construed as having some to fruition. Either way, such prognostication is best left to carny acts at the State Fair rather than being used as a business decision-making tool. However, as the new year looms, I feel compelled to at least point out some observances that seem to be gaining positive momentum and seem fairly sensible in the broader context of marketing. So, here’s five things to keep an eye on:

     

    1. Data Gathering V.S. Privacy – Eventually privacy will win, but not next year. There is so much data out there available now on everyone, from a huge variety of sources, all self-proclaimed, that marketers can access it without having to invade anything more sophisticated than a social media page. That level of data availability will continue to increase, and the volume and type of data available will ramp up next year, as more software is launched, more apps are developed, and the digital sharing movement continues to grow in the new connected environment. Marketers will have to continue to run to try and reach the top of the curve and not get too far behind in the actual viable use of that data to produce results.

    2. The Clouds Gather – Storage on site at corporate buildings will continue to drop weight like Jenny Craig moved in next door, as storage needs are more easily accommodated in the Cloud. Data centers and other aggregating technologies will continue to supplant hard on-site storage for firms under a billion in annual sales. Now cyber security exercises will have to beef up accordingly to provide the security and trust the could requires to continue acceptance and growth.

    3. Old Will Become New Again – In a sense, marketing is like fashion, if something sticks around long enough it will circle back around and become popular again. Like hemlines or trouser cuffs, marketing tactics can be reborn as if it was discovered anew by the next generation of marketers. The speed of growth of content marketing will accelerate – at least until the end of this decade – but content marketing has been used since before the turn of the century – the last century! Ask John Deere, Betty Crocker, Jell-O and P&G, who used content marketing to sell products and stay top of mind, establish market dominance and cement their brands in the minds of buyers in a certain context, with great success. The biggest change is the speed of the distribution of that content. Modern digital marketers can get a “read” on the popularity and engagement level of their content before it converts to a sale, which allows for some adjustment and fine tuning that the old-school folks didn’t have available to them.

    4. The Message Becomes The Medium – FREE!  Big agencies will put in a greater level of effort on earned media and on visibility message marketing, as opposed to just paid advertising. The success of Donald Trumps nascent presidential campaign, driving him from neutral name recognition to leading the GOP field by a significant margin in under a year, after spending a paltry $1.8 million, shows how effective this approach can be. While agencies’ bread and butter will continue to be paid media, both traditional and digital, the earned and PR practices will take a larger role in the messaging scheme, will gain power and recognition for top brands that “get it” about how information travels in today’s connected world.

    5. Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ – Going Mobile Becomes “Normal” – As the number of mobile searches continues to climb, and broadband becomes even more ubiquitous, and the number of smart devices proliferates, having a strong mobile component to your corporate web presence will become not just essential but standard. If your site doesn’t perform on a 5″ touch screen, you’ll be relegated to the digital dustbin quicker than your girlfriend’s MySpace account.

    2016 will be dubbed the year Content peaked, as the field gets crowded, the hackers learn to generate more targeted content in a mass contact way without human intervention. Computer as author is everyone’s fear, there’s enough published by humans already to circle the globe multiple times a day. We don’t need more, we need better – better engagement, better targeting, better relevance, better quality.

  • Content, Shmontent – Providing Valuable Insights To Prospects Will Convert Them To Customers, No Matter What Form It Takes . . .

    Content, Shmontent – Providing Valuable Insights To Prospects Will Convert Them To Customers, No Matter What Form It Takes . . .

    The top marketing buzzword for 2015 has got to be “Content,” surpassing “Big Data” from 2014. Everywhere you look online, in magazines or journals, webinars, conferences, you’ll run across tips, tricks, advice, approaches, models, templates, secrets and techniques on how to generate, improve, disseminate and offer content that will effectively convert inquiry to customer. It’s nearly ubiquitous, and clearly some content is better than others, and some is more appropriate than others, and some should never have been produced or disseminated at all.

    My feeling is that content marketing is not new, it’s one of those tools in the bag that solid progressive marketers have latched onto because the pathways to delivery have gotten broader and easier. Content is essentially in the same genre as sampling programs, advertorials, forced free trials, and other marketing tools where the creator can put their knowledge of their industry on display, demonstrate quality or level of service, demonstrate their understanding of issues that affect their industry, and provide possible solutions at a lower engagement risk to the recipient than actually purchasing a product or service. It allows the creator or the distributor to shape their brand perception, elevate themselves to expert status, show thought leadership, and hold themselves out there as someone who offers solutions, not just gripes about the challenges facing their industry or line of business. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s a terrific way to accomplish the goal of building credibility and showing forward thought, but it’s not as shiny and new as the most recent generation of marketers would like to believe – the delivery system is new, but the model is not.

    Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere corporation, who created a magazine featuring uses for it’s farm equipment in 1898, The Michelin Guide promoting travel and offering insights to travelers in 1900, and Jell-O salesmen offering housewives a recipe book featuring Jell-O as a key ingredient in 1904, and Betty Crocker cookbooks touting uses for their cake mixes in 1912 or so, and so on to the point where recent statistics show that 96% of corporations are using some sort of content marketing in their mix in 2014. The telling statistic in that same report is that, among respondents, only 21% of those using content marketing felt they could accurately track its ROI. I thought marketing was about testing, measuring, data-driven action that creates more efficient and cost-effective drivers of awareness and sales conversion . . .

    Hopefully, content won’t be shown to be just the next big, shiny object marketers latch onto, use inappropriately until it loses it’s effectiveness or relevance, or until the next shiny object comes along.

    To see how to do Content “right,” pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

  • It’s Not Too Late . . . Five Things You Can Do To Accelerate Your Holiday Promotions

    It’s Not Too Late . . . Five Things You Can Do To Accelerate Your Holiday Promotions

    As marketers, we’ve been trained to think ahead . . . way ahead. We’re used to thinking about New Year’s Eve marketing in June, Halloween promotions in March, Summer beach product releases in December, and so on. With retailers edging the calendar ever earlier for holiday promotions, the pressure is even stronger to start early and get those tinsel-oriented top lines working even earlier. If you haven’t planned your December holiday promotions by now, you’re so far behind the 8-ball, you may feel it’s impossible to recover. Here are five things you can do quickly enough to get you back in the game and make the holiday contribute to your Q4 results:

    1. Crash the boards and pull together a real zinger of a holiday offer for one product – something so outrageous, no one can believe it. Make sure it’s tied to another product or service that’s been a little lagging this year, and use the popular part as a loss leader to drive additional sales. “Get a FREE 10lb bag of coffee ($35 value) when you buy our new jet-powered coffee maker for just $19.95.” Or, flip it – “Get our new jet-powered coffee maker FREE when you buy 10 lbs of our signature coffee” – this last falls under the rubric, “Give Away the Razors and Sell The Blades”. Either way, craft an enticing full image e-mail and shoot it to all your top buyers, with a intro line that says something along the lines of “Your Invited To Receive the Next ‘It’ Gift . . .” to boost your open rate.
    2. Craft a full-page ad for the largest newspaper in each of your major markets, saying that in an effort to revive the non-commercial spirit of the holiday, you will not be running any ads during the holidays, and dare your competitors to do the same . . . with the right tone and imagery, this will be a winner this year in light of the Black Friday backlash we’re seeing among customers of major retailers and service providers.
    3. Craft a survey for your best customers with a participation incentive that’s irresistible – enter a drawing for a chance to win a new Corvette, or something on that order of magnitude that relates to the products or services you offer – or winner can use the chance to donate the equivalent value to the charity of the winner’s choice. Keep the survey relatively short but make the questions reveal those really crucial details about your customers that you need to move forward next year. Launch the survey on social media, and have your PR team pitch the story – leading with the charity angle – to all the major editors and bloggers in your sphere of influence. Not only will it get lots of attention, the charity angle will undoubtedly boost participation and you’ll get a full sample set of responses on a critical piece of data you need next year. Win for everyone.
    4. Donate a startlingly large number of your product or coupons for a free service you offer to our remaining troops still deployed in Afghanistan and surrounding countries who aren’t coming home for the holidays. 25,000 pairs of sneakers or $20 super strong waterproof phone covers sent to our troops with pics of them saying thanks for the holiday gift. Or if that’s not feasible, send a coupon for the product or service to their families here at home – they can use the support as well, and will appreciate the help.
    5. Hold a contest to see which philanthropist can give away the largest amount of your product or service in 30 days. Pick the largest corporation or foundation in each of your markets and challenge them to see who can buy and donate the largest cash value of your products or services in those in need in the next thirty days, with the deadline being Christmas eve. Big PR push on this one to get the word out in time, and social media can help this one a great deal – put together a short video daring the wealthy to help those around them using your products or services.

    These are all designed to move your product or service at a furious rate for a short period of time – they’re not necessarily designed to do that profitably, but most lead to additional sales of other items as a byproduct of the enhanced awareness of your brand, and that will likely keep you in the black in spite of the losing proposition of the initial marketing initiative. You’ve gotta spend to make, and these idea may spawn a few of your own that can be implemented quickly and effectively in your particular situation.

    Write me and let me know if any of these appeal to you and if they were effective for your company. I’d love to hear from you . . .

  • Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

    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”

     

  • Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    If you want to boost sales, increase membership, enhance volunteer participation, increase market share or find new profit niches, the best methods start with knowing your target audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is to listen to them. How you listen, and how you organize and collate the results of that listening is the determining factor in the usefulness of the data, and the accuracy and actionability of your analysis. Clearly, much depends on the goal, but the type of research you select will drive the type of information you receive, and dictate how reliable it is.

    For sales-, membership-, and interest-based organizations, a method termed “Right-Brain” research could hold the key to cost effective, actionable information you can use quickly and effectively to increase your knowledge of prospective customers.

    The human brain consists of two “hemispheres” left and right. Based on Nobel award-winning research by Roger Sperry in the late 1960s, it was determined that each has different functions and characteristics associated with it. Sperry’s research showed that the Left side of the brain is responsible for the more linear functions and thoughts – math, computation, organization, languages (not speech directly), rational analysis, value prioritization and decision-making. The Right side is responsible for the more interpretive and sensory aspects, like art, music, philosophy, creativity, visualization, and imagination. Left is rational, Right is more intuitive and emotional, while neither is exclusively that way. In fact, the aspect of “handedness” is reversed; with the right side controlling motor and other functions on the left side of our bodies and vice versa. Recent studies have proven this to less than completely accurate, but it seems to work in practical applications.

    Often in decision-making, especially regarding purchasing behavior, the Left side is informed by the Right. The Left rationalizes the emotional inputs from the Right to drive a purchasing decision. To drive sales, it is fundamental to appeal to that tricky Right side. When divining the needs of the customer or prospect pool you’d like to reach, it is important to gather and record output directly from the Right side. One way to accomplish that is through verbal communication. A long-form, personal, one-on-one discussion with customers, but on a large, organized scale, will elicit results you can put to use in crafting a strategy to approach the entire pool of prospects. In short, the resulting data from such small group research is projectable.

    Right-brain research has been used to test new products in the prototype stage, test new concepts for advertising, movies, even gauge the effectiveness of customer service or test brand attributes for entire companies. It can be very effective, but it requires a high level of organization, some time and patience in listening and interpreting the results, and some resources to create the components and arrange for the interviews.

    The components of this method are fairly straightforward:

    • A set of goals for the research should be established and communicated to all involved – what do you hope to find out or accomplish when you are done?
    • Describe the target audience for this goal. Discover what attributes they have in common, what characteristics can be used to select them from the general population, and how they differ from the rest of the audience.
    • A profile of the ideal participant is developed. That profile is used to select a representative sample of respondents to participate in the interviews. This profile can include age, gender, marital status, purchasing behavior, geographic proximity, socio-economic status, professional standing or experience, education, membership in organizations and many other properties.
    • A Discussion Guide or Study Guide is created. This is the blueprint for the interviews, the guide for the interviewer to weave into their questions and discussions with the participants. It starts with the goals from the first step, to be sure that the questions drive responses that allow the researcher to answer the goals. It sounds simple, but if the goals are not realistic or the scope of the study is too broad, it will show up at this stage. This study guide is the key to effective implementation of this type of research. The questions have to be formulated in such a way as to elicit a response that is accurate, honest, direct, and emotionally unguarded. Often questions are asked multiple times in different ways to check for consistency of the answers.
    • Create the list of possible participants. In some cases, especially for consumer research of this type, the facility can offer some assistance in this area, as they often have pools of potential respondents and a good database of names and demographic data from which to select a pool of candidates. Selections are made based on how closely they fit the selected set of attributes from the profile.
    • Candidates are recruited by phone, either by your staff or by the facility, and the offer is made. Most participants are compensated for their time, either with cash or an incentive gift of some sort that will appeal to the intended audience. Professionals like doctors and attorneys are usually compensated at a higher level as their time already has a given “value” in monetary terms, an hourly rate.
    • Respondents are scheduled for their interviews, which are usually 60-90 minutes in length. More than 10 interview sets per day per interviewer are not recommended as fatigue for the interviewers tends to taint the results. More than one interview can be conducted at one time, depending upon the availability of interviewers and the size of the facility. Over book initially on each day to account for no-shows when you confirm the schedule the day before the interviews by phone.
    • The interviews are conducted by skilled interviewers, professionals who are personable, knowledgeable, aware of the goals to be achieved, perceptive and skilled in interpreting human emotions and the associated verbal and physical cues that telegraph them. They are terrific listeners, and skillful at guiding the conversation to keep it on track and on time. The facilities can often recommend or have interviewers on staff.
    • Each interview is recorded to capture both audio and video, and tapes are labeled and packaged with the release form for each subject for later reference.

    Once the interviews are conducted, the tapes are reviewed, and transcripts are made, to remove any “image bias” generated by the subject’s appearance. Those tapes and those transcripts are used to analyze and codify the results, to distill them into some sort of organized format that can be used to make recommendations for action.

    How do you make the jump from transcripts to action?

    Analyzing the results of such research is a skill unto itself, as the interviews generate a huge amount of data, buried deep in the responses. It takes time and patience,(and a very left-brain-oriented person) to organize, sift, and distill all those conversations, picking out commonalities and similarities among them, and highlighting stark differences and inconsistencies that can signal false results, or emotionally guarded responses. Once that glut of data is distilled and interpreted, those interpretations are put together in an organized fashion, ranked, rated and codified, much as you would survey data or focus group data. Those ratings and rankings are put into a report, along with recommendations for action.

    Uses for the final analysis vary widely. Some distill the video recordings, editing them down to some representative responses for each major question, some pro and some con, and present them in video form along with the written analysis. Sometimes, just the transcript is enough to get a sense of the trend of the responses, and can show glaring problems or highlight positive areas simply and quickly. Sometimes the two are combined in a multi-media presentation for added impact.

    This type of research can highlight any number of aspects of the prospect pool, depending on how the research guide is structured. The more aspects of the prospective audience that are included in the study, the less depth you get in any one area. For a accurate study that is statistically projectable, and has a high degree of confidence, 30-40 interviews will usually suffice. Depending on how small the area of interest or niche you want to study, the toughest part might be finding enough respondents to interview.

    How does The Right Brain Approach complement other research methods?

    The Right Brain Approach measures emotions, not people.  Quantitative data is valuable, but the information it provides can be even more valuable when used in conjunction with Right Brain Research.  For example, if you conduct Right Brain Research before a quantitative survey, you will know what the key issues are and will be able to ask the right questions and ask them in the right way based on the actual language that consumers use.  Once Right Brain Research results are known, future surveys can target the factors that affect buying decisions with more accuracy.

    How can we use what we learn from Right Brain Research in conjunction with the results of our quantitative research?

    What you gain in understanding from Right Brain Research will illuminate the information garnered in quantitative assessments.  Now you have a chance to know the rest of the story!  Actually, the Paul Harvey analogy is an excellent one.  He tells you all the facts with no interpretive framework.  Your mind goes off in all different directions trying to make sense of what he is saying.  Then he hits you with a surprising ending or twist and all the facts make sense in a startling way.  This is what Right Brain Research can do for your company/brand/packaging.*

    No matter how you approach it, speaking directly with a population closely representative of your target audience is extremely empowering in it ability to accurately inform your creative, sales, membership recruitment or product development activities. You can’t know too much about customers, and this method allows you to gain insights that can’t be accessed any other way quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.