THINKing

Forgotten Gems

Through no fault of their own, sometimes really good posts just get overlooked. Here are a few forgotten gems you may have missed.

Grandma Says -  Southern grandmothers have often said, “there are only three times a respectable person’s name should be in the paper: when you are born, when you are married, and when you die.” This is the one area in which I part company with my grandmothers.

Brand Euthanasia -  Some brands should be allowed to die, or if that fails, then we owe it to them to kill them.

New Business Tip: Do Great Work For Current Clients -My marketing mentor, Bill Loeffler, once said the the best new business program is doing great work for current clients. He was right.

The Value Of Connections – As we have discussed before, the value of connections in business cannot be underestimated. I’m talking primarily about tight connections that you use ruthlessly to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.

To Market, To Market… -  What does buying a fat pig have to do with your business? Stick with me and all will be revealed.

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Dead Brands

2008 was the 100th anniversary of Hydrox, a creme-filled chocolate cookie whose name sounded like bad-tasting medicine. We wrote about the cookie back then because its latest owner, Kellogg’s, was using the anniversary in an attempt to resuscitate the brand. Bring on the CPR!

At the time, we predicted that this was a brand which would not be successful. Sadly, we were right. Kellogg’s just didn’t give it the resources or attention it needed to take on the knock-off that became the number 1 creme-filled cookie, Oreo.  The brand disappeared in 2009.

Although Hydrox had a small, but fanatical following, plus a unique story and point of differentiation, Kellogg’s – I believe – thought that its distribution muscle and PR would win the day.

As a PR guy, I would love for this to have been the case. But in a fight like this, you must advertise, and that’s primarily where Kellogg’s marketing effort failed. Distribution and PR can take down a #2 brand, but when you are trying to supplant a #1, you must dominate advertising and your campaign must have high frequency.

Kellogg’s tried simple CPR when it really needed the defibrillator. Result: a dead brand.

Are there any dead brands you’d like to see brought back to life?

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Advertising’s Not Dead, But Advertisers Are Trying To Kill It

Advertising is on life support but it is not dead. Although it seems that advertisers and their agencies are trying to kill it.

When done correctly, it still has its place in the marketing mix. The problem with advertising, as in so many marketing tactics, is that companies launch ads before they really think their program through.

First, let’s think about what we want our advertising to achieve. You should tie your advertising objectives to the objectives you have for your business. Ask yourself what benefits advertising can help bring to the business.

Are you looking for new customers who don’t know you? Are you trying to get a share of your competitors’ customers who know a little about you? Or, are you trying to get your own customers to buy more from you? The answers to these questions will help you establish what type message is needed because one ad cannot address all carbon-based life forms.

Ads need to be aimed at specific audiences. And media dollars, if you’re fortunate enough to have them, are precious, so let’s target the ad message as we’ll need to target that media spending.

Prospects need to have their interest aroused, while you might need a “make a change” message aimed at competitors’ customers, and your own customers may respond best to a loyalty message.

Now, you should determine how best to get your message out. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising says that advertising is “the means of providing the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects at the lowest possible cost.”

This means that there are lots of ways to deliver your advertising message. You are not limited to the big three: radio, TV and newspapers.

Direct mail might be a better answer for you if you have a narrowly defined audience. Going after a mass audience may mean you need mass media.

Remember: it’s the most persuasive message to the right prospects at the lowest cost. And with corporate advertising spending, remember the old adage, “Nothing happens until the cash register rings,” and adjust your message and media decisions accordingly.

Marketers tend to overestimate the power of advertising. They want to hit the market with a big campaign and receive a flood of new business. Here’s the dirty little secret: most people ignore most advertising. It can’t make people do what they don’t want to do, nor interest them in what they are not interested in. Advertising is a crutch – a strong, efficacious one when done right, but additive to the rest of your communications programming.

Your job as a marketer is to do the heavy lifting up front to develop a compelling message, and deliver it effectively to a specific audience using the right medium. Otherwise you are wasting your time because your ad campaign will be dead on arrival.

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5 Essential Big Boy Marketing Links

The big boys of marketing, those elite companies in the Fortune 500, know some things the rest of us don’t. Here are a few posts that deal with Big Boy Marketing.

Big Boy Marketing – Part 1 – In working with our Fortune 1000 clients I have come to see that we all can learn a few things from these Big Boys. They may miss the boat on some things, but they get a lot right.

Big Boy Marketing – Part 2 – Ask Your Customers. Big Boys do the necessary research.

Big Boy Marketing – Part 3 – Choose Partners Strategically. The Big Boys know how to find a partner who fits their needs. 

Aligning Metrics – Years ago, I worked with a Fortune 500 company on an integrated marketing communications program. It was integrated everywhere except with sales. And therein lies the rub. 

Take Market Share Now – Bold marketers know this: an economic downturn is the perfect time to gain market share. Spending marketing money during tough times seems counterintuitive, but time and again it has paid off for some of the best known brands.

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Plan? We Don’t Need No Stinking Plan!

Now that technology has rendered every moment a marketing moment, how do you develop a plan in which you can have any confidence? That’s the question posited by colleague Scott Hepburn recently and I thought it was a good subject for this blog to tackle.

I’ll admit to you that I am a planner. I believe in setting strategy first and then letting the strategy dictate the tactics. I believe that if you have done the thinking upfront, you’ll be ready for serendipity or crisis if they arise.

Or as General Dwight D. Eishenhower once said, “plans are nothing; planning is everything.” What I believe Eisenhower was saying is that you must plan your attack but once the shooting starts you must have the flexibility to handle the unexpected. So, I’m on the same page with him, as is Rodger Johnson, who says, “focus on the important interactions and let research reveal those.”

Jason Falls appends Eisenhower’s thoughts, “hire smart people who can make plan-based decisions on the fly.”

“A marketing plan is built around a sustainable, true brand,” says Jay Ehret. “Trying to build a marketing plan that accounts for every interaction is sure to lead to a convoluted, cumbersome plan with a heavy reliance on tactics. However, if you build a plan around being and living your brand, then you are prepared for every interaction, because you are being the brand you promised to be.”

According to Tom Pick,  social media and marketing are distinctly different. “Marketing plans are for marketing.  Social media guidelines are for providing basic guidance for interactions from other functional groups.”

That’s what we say. What do you think?

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We Care. No, Really!

Listening to the radio today I heard an ad that actually said “because we care.” That was their brand promise. I hear or see lame marketing statements like this too often.

Truth is that company on the radio does not care. If it really cared, they’d spend enough time thinking about why people should do business with them and then develop a brand promise around that.

You can tell me that you care until the cows come home and I won’t believe you. It’s empty chest-thumping. But I know caring when I see it. If you and your people demonstrate to me that they care, then I’ll spread the message for you and it will become part of your brand promise.

Take the time to do the research, define your audience, hone your message and then develop relevant, impactful and original advertising and marketing programs to spread the word. Otherwise, it is clear to all that you just don’t care.

What do you think?

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Listen Up

Last week digital colleague Jay Ehret asked me to participate in his weekly Marketers  Roundtable podcast along with Bill Schley and Denise Lee Yohn.  We batted around integration, messaging in social media, brand leverage and listening to customers. So, give us a listen here. 

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Top Content 2009 Edition

In case you missed some of our most read content this year, below is a sample of the top posts of 2009. Is your favorite here?

Twittering Journalists

Customer Retention Strategies

When Billboards Go Bad

Twitter: Time Waster Or Cool Tool?

Branding Lessons From Santa

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Of Spokesmen & Sluts

I would never recommend that a client select a celebrity to be a spokesman for its products. Period. End of story. I know the potential benefits of using the right celebrity to draw attention to your company, product or service. I just don’t think it is worth the possible problems.

Celebrities often seem to have more than their share of moral failings. So, when they fall off the straight and narrow path, the accompanying crash is louder than it would be for you or me.

Whether it’s a pro golfer running around with porn stars and sluts, an angelic faced Ivory Snow pitchwoman who turns out to be a porn star or the world’s best swimmer taking hits off a bong,  if you align your brand too closely with a celebrity, you are asking for trouble. You are ceding the brand to someone over whom you have no control.

I’d rather tie my brand to a brand promise  – the statement I make to customers that spells out what they should expect in interactions with me, my people, as well as my products and services. Here, I have some control.

Then, there’s the whole question of whether the celebrity overshadows the brand. Can you name a celebrity and correctly identify the companies for which he or she speaks? It’s like beer commercials that rely on humor to get your attention but once they are over, you can’t name the brand because the commercial didn’t tether the humor to the brand promise.

What do you think about the value of celebrity spokesmen?

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Be Relevant

It comes as no surprise to me that Americans are trying harder than ever to avoid advertising. According to a new study by Synovate,

More than four in 10 US consumers said they were skipping ads on TV and the radio as well as avoiding Websites with intrusive ads more in 2009 than they were the year before.

Why, you ask? Because advertising is increasingly less relevant. We’ve discussed this before: advertising needs to be relevant, original and impactful or consumers will avoid it like the plague. And they certainly won’t share the ad with their friends.

When asked about positive ad-related activities, such as searching for advertisements online, sharing and discussing ads with friends, or following brands on Facebook and Twitter, responses were in the single digits. Most consumers reported never doing any such activities.

Relevant ads get shared. But most ads aren’t relevant because the advertiser hasn’t done the hard part: determining who his target audience is from a demographic and psychographic perspective. The more you know about the customer, the easier it is for your creatives to develop relevant, original and impactful messages, and to determine the best ways and vehicles through which to disseminate your messages.

But I’m not letting the agencies off the hook here either. Too often, the agency goes for the easy, humorous approach because they know that using humor increases likeability of the brand. Here’s the problem with that: they inject the humor but leave the brand message out of the equation. How many times have you laughed at a beer commercial only to say after it was over, “whose ad was that?”

Remember, understand your customer and ensure your agency is developing relevant, original and impactful ads for you, or save your money for something besides advertising.

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