Marketing Rant

I recently had a chance to visit the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. When we got there, the tour bus had already left, so all we could do was check out The Rocket Garden and the Shuttle prototype turned into an exposition.

I didn’t need a tour: There was something that blew me away without that tour. The old rockets.

They turned out to be so unexpectedly plain jane and low-tech. So… what’s the word… mundane. The gloss of a picture in the book comes off, and what’s left is a sheet of metal clumsily wrapped into a tube. I found it difficult to imagine them fly… Even more so to imagine someone crawl into that tin bucket called the cabin and fly these things.

Nonetheless, there they were, artifacts of the glorious past, a testament to the courageous epoch.

Now think about your marketing. Are you spending money on the looks? The only person that’s going to be impressed is you. Your customers won’t care. Are you trying to make it fancy or to make it work?

If you’re going to study ads, start with those plane jane all-text ones that trick you and make you think they are editorials. People who run these ads treat them as their sales force: if these ads don’t produce sales they get immediately pulled just like a sales person that doesn’t sell gets fired.

The gawky machines that helped the man conquer the space didn’t need to be slick. The ad that will help you conquer the market won’t be a slick one either.

Come to Living Well on March 1st to enjoy a fabulous dinner, network with other small business owners, and participate in an interactive workshop I will be doing afterwards. Click this link for details and registration: The 7 Key Profit Drivers. The venue is small, only fits 20 people or so. Register early if you want to get in.

…are chefs. Here’s what Geoffrey Johnson of www.enville.com writes in his Wine Loop (we’re friends enough for him to keep me on the circulation list, for which I’m eternally grateful):

“My thoughts on this are purely O Mourvédre, how I love thee. Liquid sunshine, extreme fruit, full in the mouth on a broad platform, supported by just enough tannins. The varietal Mourvédre does so well in Vin de pays d’Oc, a gem in their crown. I bought several cases of the previous vintage and wished I bought more, very short term cellaring potential. My advice, buy more than you think you will need, believe me, you will need it all, a gift from Baccus at only $11.95 per bottle.”

(Now I’m afraid he’s really going to kick me off the list!)

Wonderful, powerful copy. A carnival of metaphors. A parade of the imagery. (Last time I checked, the only fruit that goes into wine is grapes. And how the heck do you bottle “sunshine”?)

Hey, there is even a testimonial and a “call to action”, and Geoffrey isn’t even selling this stuff himself!

Such writing creates magic. People love magic. Good chefs are magicians when they craft those glorious edibles with their hands. Great chefs know how to weave some of this magic into their writing too.

Now, how do you write magic about your business?

I did a talk on measurable and quantifiable marketing for a Rotary Club in Durham this morning. In order to illustrate my points, I decided to prepare by going through my “swipe file”. My goal was to pick a couple of industries (I chose real estate and insurance) and find some good ads and some not so good ones and use them as my props.

Easier said then done.

For real estate, I had a couple of newspaper clippings of Craig Proctor’s “edumercials” or “advertorials” that look like an article but are specially crafted ads with an 800 number in the end to request a special report. I also had Craig’s little ad from the Yellow Pages.

As usual, bad ads weren’t a problem: There were plenty of them everywhere. No wonder Craig is such real estate dynamo! (By the way, if you’re in real estate, you’re just stupid if you don’t study what people like Craig do. Actually, you can be in any business and still get a truckload of million-dollar ideas just by dissecting this stuff!)

Onwards to insurance. My, oh my! I went through my local Yellow Pages, all other Yellow Pages books I had, the Richmond Hill directory, and a whole bunch of newspapers. Not a single ad worth the paper it’s printed on!

Here’s a template for a bad ad that they all follow invariably:

1. {Company name} Insurance Brokers [Inc. / Ltd]

2. [Established / Since] {Year}

3. Home, Auto, Life, Commercial, Industrial, Small Business

4. Quality [Personal] Service

5. Call [Us First] For A Free [No Obligation] Quote

6. {Telephone Number}

7. {Address}

I’m not kidding you: There were 6 of them on one page, all following the same wrong formula! After awhile, I was like “Guys, have some mercy!”

I couldn’t get even a single good one for my presentation! I had to mock it up myself.

In a situation like this even a lousy ad could work ok, as long as it is about as bad as every other one out there. Every ad is generating it’s share of leads because all ads are equally bad.

But if just one of these people decides to smarten up and creates an ad that is even half as good as it could ultimately be – he will simply wipe you out!

Don’t let that happen to you: It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”. Smarten up yourself.

There is a classic story of a shampoo manufacturer who doubled his sales by making a little change to the usage instructions on the back of the bottle. All he did was adding one word in the end. Of course, you want to know what this magic word is, don’t you?

Well, it’s a blog, not a book where you don’t know who the killer is until the last chapter. So here it goes, that magic word:

“Repeat.”

Yes, all that guy did was this: Where it said “bluh, bluh, bluh…then rinse.”, he added “Repeat”. Just one word and his sales went through the roof!

Last week I was reminded of this story at the grocery store, of all places. I spotted a stack of boxes of mandarin oranges. Apparently, they came from someone who knew that old trick. The artwork on the boxes prominently displayed a fruit basket (they were smart not to put just mandarin oranges in there – you won’t want your child to eat a whole box of them), and here’s what’s written next to it:

“5 to 10 a day! Are you getting enough?”

Bravo! (I bought 3 boxes, and the mandarin oranges were outstanding, by the way.)

Not that blogging has ever been a part of some “underground” movement, but my spell checker never fails to smudge “blogging” with red stain.

A major breakthrough came in last month with the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announcing “blog” being the #1 most popular word that people look up. Here is a link for you to check it out for yourselves: http://www.m-w.com/info/04words.htm.

I guess it doesn’t get any more official that this. So “blogging” is now proper English. Congratulation to you bloggers! And if you’re not blogging for your business, you’re making it struggle for no good reason.

And maybe it’s about time I taught my old spell checker some new tricks too…

We are so focused on the product our business provides we forget what the most important reason people do business with us is.

It is not the low prices we offer, and not the fact that our business has been around since the first French revolution.

The most important reason people do business with us is because they like their experience. Because it feels good. Because it’s fun.

Now, you don’t have to be a funny and witty person (although that certainly helps) to make it fun doing business with you. I am a rather boring guy, at least most of the time. If you are like me, then the solution is simple: delegate it, either to a person… or to a system.

The latter is certainly my choice, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

Please understand that fun doesn’t mean practical jokes (although I know of some gutsy fun-preneurs who use them very successfully). The important part is to make your clients feel good – prior to, during, and after the sale. And this will mean different things to different businesses.

Just to wrap it up with the topic of recycled materials and make a sort of a “month end” (see several previous posts with more on this).

Mistake #3: Using Marketing To Fix The Perception Of Your Product When The Product Itself Needs To Be Fixed

… and what if the recycled manufactured products are not as good as they tell us? (I personally don’t think that’s true, but let’s stay with this thought for a minute).

Then what’s being offered not only is not ethical, it represents another classic marketing mistake: We have a lousy product (recycled manufactured goods), so let’s just throw some money at it and tell everyone the product is great!

Don’t you ever try that. Here’s what going to happen:

If your product is not really that great and you decide to use marketing to CHANGE the perception by pouring bushels of money into the campaign, all it will do for you is annoy a larger number of people to a greater extent.

Fix the product first, then throw the proverbial stones when it’s time.

Iacocca had to fix the Chrysler product BEFORE he could go on the road advertising it.

Mistake #2: Using A “Vitamin”, Not A “Pill” Marketing Strategy

Granted, some people will be responsive to a promise of better environment for our children and grand children. But most folks will just ignore it since there is no immediate pain relief or gratification for them.

Every single product or service in the world either addresses an immediate pain (a “pill”) or mitigates a future risk (a “vitamin”). When it comes to marketing, pills work and vitamins generally don’t.

And “better environment” is a “vitamin”.

Mistake #1: “Me Too” or “We’re Just As Good” Marketing Strategy

Now then, let’s assume that the products made from recycled materials are as good and as safe as the ones made from new materials.

In this case a proposal to spend more money on educating the consumer (you and me) about this fact comes from a desire to build a “recycled materials brand”. (Hey, look at this little triangle: It’s a recycling logo!)

The problem with this type of “brand” though is that these products are only “as good” as — and not any better than — other products. Which means the “brand” has no foundation, and no amount of marketing (i.e., tax money) will be able to fix that.

“As good” just simply won’t cut it. No matter how much money you throw at it.