Marketing Matters

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Don’t you love it when someone you respect points you to someone they respect? That’s how I found out about Hugh MacLeod and the Gaping Void.

I’m blown away by how insightful his drawings are. Some of them seem so unartistic that you might be inclined to dismiss them. Don’t. There’s a lot to each one of his ideas, and anyone involved in messaging can learn a lot from his approach and his content.

In one of his “back of a business card” cartoons, he states “It’s not what the software does. It’s what the user does.” In another, the message is even more blunt “Quality isn’t Job One. Being totally fucking amazing is Job One.”

He packages his message simply, and marketers need to hear what he has to say.

Thanks to Rick Julian at Quo Vadis (another amazing message-builder) for enlightening me.

I’ll confess that my original title for this post was “It’s Cool, It’s Useful, It Makes Life Simpler – It’s from Microsoft???” Like most people, I’ve done my fair share of Microsoft bashing. After all, I use Vista, so that’s really no surprise. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Bing is really cool, very useful and even pretty.

Haven’t heard of Bing yet? It’s designed to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista  – lay it to waste by making life exponentially easier for the people who use it.

Bing’s introductory video does a good job at making it clear that this is a serious tool designed with the user in mind. That’s great, of course, but for me, though, what stands out the most is the approach Microsoft is taking with its marketing. The thing that impresses me is that it’s so thorough: they employed standard big-brand tactics like issuing a press release and doing a tradeshow launch, but then they created an interesting video that informs you about Bing’s functionality pleasantly in less than 3 minutes, and they make it easy for you to follow their progress on Twitter and Facebook.

As if that weren’t already an exceptional marketing program, they went and did it all really well. The video lets you know exactly why you should care and why we’re all probably going to end up using Bing. It elicits more “oh cool!” and “hey, look at this” reactions than most campaigns. The social media pages have actual information on them. And the site itself is sleek and well-designed.

I want to make it clear that I’m not just swooning for no good reason. I’m swooning for two good reasons: first, Microsoft really rose to the occasion in marketing Bing well. Second, it’s actually good.

To my friends in Redmond, my hat is off to you. Thanks for the pleasant surprise.

I’ve never met a business owner who hasn’t believed that change is good, but sometimes changing nothing will provide better brand value. Ben & Jerry’s were recently presented with just such a perfect pitch by one of their main competitors, Haagen-Dazs.

Here’s what happened:
Haagen-Dazs noticed that their production costs were rising and started trying to find solutions. They had several options:

• Exert market pressure on suppliers who are jacking up prices because of last year’s increase in oil prices
• Reach out through social media channels to their most active consumers and explain the situation
• Launch a viral campaign in which they demonstrate the way they’re fighting for summer against the forces of evil
• Pass on the cost increase to the consumer
• Reduce their profit margin
• Improve their internal efficiency to save money
• Shrink the size of a “pint” and hope no one notices they’re getting less with no change in price.

Which do you suppose they did? If you guessed “shrink the size of their pint” you win the kewpie doll. With a murmur on their Web site Haagen-Dazs explained that they are no longer in the business of selling pints of ice cream. They shrunk their packages from 16 to 14 ounces

Ben & Jerry’s responded immediately with a well-distributed press release that was very simple. Everyone’s feeling the pinch, they wrote, and “now more than ever you deserve your full pint of ice cream.”

With that simple statement, they positioned themselves as a brand that cares about you and your family in this economy and Haagen-Dazs as the brand that doesn’t.

Sometimes business realities are harsh and prices need to go up and things need to change. A wise company will figure out how to come out a hero when it’s struggling against market forces. That’s why they employ hundreds of professional storytellers (read marketers): to figure out how to structure the story. That’s the way you stay on top of it and preserve your brand value. And these days, marketers have incredible tools with which to be clever and reach out to their consumers.

What you don’t do is ignore the fact that acquiring new consumers is about brand image. Don’t blow yours by handing your primary competitor an opportunity to make huge gains in brand value by doing nothing except issuing a press release.

It was a pretty harsh wake-up call to have the Online ID Calculator tell me I’m only digitally dabbling.

source: http://www.onlineidcalculator.com/digitalscale.html

Considering the pains I take as a marketer to establish continuity in my messaging across my blog, site, LinkedIn profile, Facebook page and Twitter (which I’ll admit I only do when I have something to say), I was surprised I didn’t cross the threshold into “digitally distinct”. That’s a good indicator of the lengths you have to go to truly make your brand distinct.

The Calculator was created “to help [you] understand how [your] personal brand shows up online.” It’s free and it’s certainly worthwhile. No matter who you are or how you’re using your online presence, it’s worth knowing. Brands can quickly get away from you, no matter how hard you try to control them – just look at what happened to Domino’s this week.

A tool like this is a quick and easy way to check up on the status of your brand. If you find out it’s in a bad quadrant, you should take a firmer grip of the reins and start to steer your messaging in the direction you want it to go.

If you’re not sure how to coordinate your branding efforts, be they your personal brand or for your company, take a look at this video I did for TheLadders.com. It’s directed at job seekers, but it’s really for anyone who cares about a brand they’re involved with.

Did you try it? How do you rank?

There was a very kind article written about me in the Career Advice section of TheLadders.com yesterday. It was a bit unexpected – while I had spoken to a journalist they had hired, I thought it was background on a different project.

The article wraps up a very eventful ten days for me – last Monday I was on Fox & Friends. Two days later, I was taping a segment for a new venture I hope to be writing about soon, and now this article.

If you’re a Ladders subscriber, you can read the article here, along with a lot of other great career advise. Otherwise, you can see it below.

Many thanks to TheLadders.com for this great story!

Marketing Pro Remakes His Image
Marketing executive details his job search and offers tips to other marketers looking for work.

by Patty Orsini

William Scheckel is a marketing executive skilled in marketing financial and technical services. He had never thought much about marketing himself, though, until one day last May, a couple of weeks after he had been laid off from a management consultancy in New York.

“A colleague, who is the chief marketing officer at a company I respect, pitched me back to me,” Scheckel said. “It was an eye-opener. I realized that I needed to put together this pitch, to get the word out about me. It was very helpful to get that kind of support.”

For Scheckel — who was still upset about being laid off and the way his former employer had handled the situation — it was the right thing to hear at the right time. “I could continue to be angry, shocked and concerned about the layoff,” the Montclair, N.J., resident said. “But I pushed myself to take that fear and anger and turn it toward making the effort to market myself.”

The MktgLadder member had many reasons to regroup as quickly as possible. “A few weeks before I was laid off, I had told my wife, who is a teacher and was miserable in her job, to go ahead and take some time off, rethink some things and then find a new job,” he said. “And my son had just turned 1. So, talk about putting everything in perspective! I knew what I needed to do.”

A video introduction
One of the first things he did was redo his Web site, adding a video introduction that would make that all-important pitch. “I put it to together with a friend of mine who is a film editor, who offered to do it for free,” he said. “We created this introduction that says, ‘Here’s what it’s like to talk to me, here’s what we will be talking about. If you like what you hear, let’s continue this conversation in person.’ ”

That exercise led Scheckel to rewrite his resume, using much the same language he had used for his Web site. On both his Web site and in his resume, he is doing the same thing, he said: marketing his brand.

“If I were a marketing consultant to myself, I would be hammering out the different aspects of my brand,” he said. “I know what I am good for: small- and medium-sized businesses. I wanted to make sure my messaging says this. If I do it right, I will display my value properly.”

While Scheckel is looking for a full-time position, consulting work is keeping him busy, in between job interviews, networking and taking care of his toddler son. His sense of humor keeps him going. “There are extra hours in the day when other people sleep,” he joked. “I stay up late, I get up early. I’m home with my son a couple of days a week, and on those days, if I can tire him out by 1 p.m., I can get a good three hours of work in. There’s not a lot of time to watch Battlestar Galactica re-runs.”

Scheckel has structured his week to fit in job hunting with consulting and refreshing his Web site. “Wednesdays and Fridays are job hunt days,” he said. “Mondays I have a regular gig with a company doing marketing work. I do like to have one day that’s flexible. But getting into a routine, where my day is structured like a job, is important.”

Beware of pigeonholes
While he is looking to broaden his search to other industries, “no matter what I try to do, I get tagged as someone who does marketing for financial and tech companies,” he said. “Marketing is marketing, and it can be applied across the board. In the 1990s, I worked in Germany, and my clients came from a lot of different businesses. But the places that are most likely to talk to me are financial companies, and no one is hiring there right now. With tech, I prefer small to mid-sized companies, and finding something viable can be difficult.”

But if he could choose any industry to market? “If Carnegie Hall or Jazz at Lincoln Center came knocking on my door, I would bend over backwards to work there,” he said. “I’m a musician; I would love to work in the arts.” But he is being realistic right now. Scheckel said he has been told by people in other industries that “no one is taking a chance right now. They want you to come in and be up to speed. They expect you to know the landscape, know the people. There is no time for ramping up.”

Career Advice from TheLadders

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• Sales Rep Leaves High-Volume Quotas for Higher Elevation
• Real Estate Director Plans Exit Strategy

Some days are tougher than others, he said. “My outlook varies from moment to moment,” he said. “It can go from staring into the abyss to feeling like something has got to give.” One big relief: His wife did go back to work, as a part-time teacher and part-time administrator at a local college.

And he keeps marketing himself, even to himself. “I’m good at what I do, and somebody is going to see the value,” he said. “I never let a contact rest. I never know where an idle conversation is going to lead. I’m in marketing, I’m not a salesman, but I’ve become a good salesman. I pull on whatever thread I can find.”

Did you catch me on Fox & Friends yesterday?  It was an interesting segment broadcast nationally on the role of unemployed fathers. Fox posted half of the panel’s conversation on its site, but the more interesting part was only available to those who tuned in (or who are reading this).

In the second half, we talked about how an entrepreneurial spirit is the only way to combat the economic environment we’re currently enduring. For established companies everywhere, that means that the surest way to weather this storm is to invest in your brand to draw out what makes your offering unique. Now is the time to get out your message in creative and engaging ways.

Many companies are waiting right now for things to improve. But change doesn’t happen on its own. Change needs an advocate – and right now it needs an impatient one. Now is the time to invest in your brand, to strengthen its voice and value. Now is the time to make your message cut through the white noise of anxiety in the marketplace. Create a bold statement of your value. Your customers are listening. An articulate voice can be of immense value to them, especially when your competitors are just muddling through. That articulate voice, that clear message are the products of your brand at work. It’s times like these that make having a brand worthwhile.

So yes, hunker down, be careful, be prudent – do all the smart, common sense things you know you should. But don’t wait – leave that to the competition. Now is the time to create!

An e-mail for eTail 2009 landed in my box the other day with the following announcement: “Pundits agree that hard times also present opportunities for innovation.”

Maybe I’m foolish for thinking that major organizations that enjoy good reputations and talk to marketers all the time wouldn’t throw such fluff in our faces. I mean, surely marketers are responsible for plenty of fluff in the sales dialogue – and if we’re not, Scott Adams may be out of a job. But to try to out-fluff the source of fluff is just asking to be taken to task.

So, what’s so fluffy about this, you ask?

For starters, three out of the ten words are meaningless buzzwords in this context: pundit, opportunity and innovation. Taken alone, any one of them can actually mean something. Together, they suck the meaning out of the sentence.

Sometimes, though, if we’re not careful, we do end up sounding fluffy when we try to be sincere. So let’s give our friends at eTail the benefit of the doubt and consider what it is they’re trying to communicate: Marketers need the external validation of “pundits” to be motivated to come up with new ideas.

This is the fluff that irritates me as a marketer. Coming up with new ideas is what any good marketer should be doing every day. To be blunt, all our audiences have heard it all before. They wouldn’t listen to the same old message if you strapped them to a chair while you repeated it over and over. If you’re not trying to find a new way to present your ideas, you’re not being listened to. You don’t need a pundit to tell you that, you just need common sense.

There’s no excuse for bad messaging just like there’s no substitute for common sense when it comes to marketing. Circumstances don’t call for innovation. Your audience does – every day.

With everyone trying to be a thought leader these days, I have to wonder, who exactly is supposed to be thought-following?

Most marketers and CEOs will tell you that you can best differentiate your company by being the smart guy in the room, the one everyone listens to. The logic is something like this: “People are inundated by messages these days, so if you show people you’re smart, you’ll cut through the chatter, they’ll listen and you’ll make money.”

There are a bunch of problems with that. Here are just a few of them:

If everyone’s doing that (and everyone is trying to), there’s no rising above the chatter because the chatter is now just different chatter than it was before it was important to be a thought leader.

Not everyone is smart enough to be worth listening to. Sorry to be blunt, but not everyone can really have pioneering thoughts on a subject. And nothing is worse than someone who’s not that good demanding they be listened to.

Unless you’re very careful, by positioning yourself as a thought leader, you’re effectively telling your clients and customers that they’re not as smart as you. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a bad way to win people over.

But even if you are able to overcome all of those pitfalls, you still may not find thought leadership beneficial to your business. Why not? Because most decision makers (whether they’re making those decisions about which doughnuts to buy or how to allocate their $500 million budget) want to feel in control and lead themselves (which is exactly how thought leadership became the popular idea it is today).

In other words, it doesn’t matter what decision someone is making, they want to make it themselves. What they want is someone who can help them make the best decision they can by being a sounding board for them and brainstorming with them.

The key, then, if you want to sell your expertise, is to be a thought partner. Be the one decision makers turn to in order to have some help along the way. Being a thought partner means you’re sharing the load, it means you’re reliable, present, thoughtful and, most importantly, listening. It means you’re a catalyst that helps great ideas come to life.

Thought partnership is like great jazz improvisation. Someone starts a riff and you and a group of people jam on that and create some incredibly complex and beautiful music. Your being the room makes that music soar, but you don’t create it alone. Of course, not every meeting will sound like Coltrane, but it will be a lot better than if you insist on playing solo while everyone else in the room waits for you to sit down and be quiet so they can play a note, too.

So be a real thought-provoker. Be a thought partner.

Just to keep harping on Microsoft for a moment, what’s really a shame with their last three major campaigns (Jerry Seinfeld, I’m a PC, and the Mojave Experiment) is that in trying to make their products and platforms interesting and engaging, they failed to engage their audience’s emotions. It’s all demonstration without audience empathy, they’re saying “this is funny, thou shalt enjoy” without eliciting the emotions naturally.  The stories aren’t well constructed.

And while they’ve been trying to confront Apple more and more directly, they’re not attacking them where they’re vulnerable. Apple will always get high marks for being interesting, but it will also always get equally poor marks for being an environmental hazard . One of Apple’s greatest strengths has always been its strong visual element, especially vivid colors. But Apple doesn’t seem to care for green very much. Sealed batteries in popular devices wear out in a few years causing a fully functional device to be tossed into the garbage heap. How much waste is Apple responsible for? And then let’s talk about battery chemicals seeping into the ground.

Meanwhile, the PC (and competitors’ phones, computers, portable music players, etc) have batteries and other parts that can be replaced easily and disassembling a PC to recycle its various parts is both a cinch and lucrative.

The only real reason that Microsoft wouldn’t steer its advertising in that direction would be that, as a company, it’s not exceptionally green itself. Correcting that, though, is a lot less expensive than high-profile ad campaigns that don’t accomplish anything. And it’s already a world better than Apple, according to environmental watchdogs such as ClimateCounts.

The “I’m a PC” ad used a world of faces. Make those faces do something good for the world they represent and people will care more.

It’s so hard not to talk about Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” campaign, I’m not going to try to resist. It’s pretty obvious that the strategy is to put the “personal” back in personal computer, but they leave unanswered the question of what, if any, emotional tie those people have to their PC or that we viewers could have to them. That’s supposed to be the whole point of making a brand personal, right? Make people care about the brand and the product. They didn’t.

One could argue that it’s not necessary for us to feel anything about our PCs at this point. PCs are ubiquitous and utilitarian. They’re almost like water faucets or electrical outlets – I turn it on and it goes. And frankly, most PCs run Microsoft products most of the time. PCs running Microsoft products have become a basic household utility. When was the last time you felt one way or the other about your basic utilities (assuming they’re working)?

And that’s the reason we users get so upset about things like Vista when it crashes or has crappy functionality (a search function that can’t find anything???) or the like. That’s not how a utility is supposed to be. If my PC stops working when everything seems fine, I feel like I’m experiencing a rolling blackout in a third world country. My computer and the third world should not be comparable.

Which brings me to Orville Redenbacher. Mr. Redenbacher (or at least his agency) realized that popcorn was being widely consumed without much thought to the manufacturer or the respective quality. To make people think, briefly, about their choice, he got up in front of the camera and, like some quirky old uncle we all seem to have, talked to us about popping corn. He turned his product into a brand we cared about.

When I was growing up, it seemed like every third commercial was either Mr. Redenbacher talking about popcorn or Frank Purdue talking about chicken. So if Microsoft wants us to care about PCs and Microsoft products, why not use Bill Gates? How about if Bill Gates talked to the world about their PCs? If I saw twenty-five seconds of Vista-tweaking advice from Bill Gates and a five second tag, I’m not only going to watch that commercial, I’m going to care about it, go to the site to download the suite of them that will inevitably be released, talk about it and sing their praises for being smart. I bet a lot of other people would, too.