Marketing Archives - Page 20 of 29 - Otis Regrets... or not

Defining and using the Unique Selling Proposition in your marketing

The Unique Selling Proposition is the attribute that makes your product or service different from any other, at least in the way you describe it. The USP can be a powerful weapon once you know your product and you know the audience’s needs or desires: now you have the opportunity to present the sole solution that gives them exactly what they want.

Every now and then you come across a product that truly is unique… durian, anybody? But often the USP is a matter of a clever marketer identifying a product attribute that’s unique and then blowing that up until it becomes an identity for the brand. Example: M&Ms melt in your mouth… not in your hands. The Mars company found during WWII that sailors in the South Pacific preferred them to Hershey Bars because they didn’t melt in the sun, and turned that into a brand identity.

Jerry Della Femina, who had a successful agency in Los Angeles when I was getting my start in the business, used to run a great long copy ad in the local Adweek about the “Capo D’Astra Bar”. Seems he was a cub copywriter hired to a backwater piano account and went to learn about the client’s product at their remote upstate NY factory. The client kept saying “all pianos are pretty much the same” till Della Femina crawled under the piano and noticed a heavy band of metal across the bottom.

“Oh, that’s the capo d’astra bar, and I guess it is unique” the client said and it reminded him of the time that they’d had to knock out the wall at Carnegie Hall to install their pianos by crane, because the capo d’astra bar made them too heavy to go up the elevator. Carnegie Hall?? “Oh, didn’t I tell you, all the pianos at Carnegie Hall are our brand.” And thus was born the campaign for Steinway, the official piano of Carnegie Hall, with a resourceful copywriter digging deep to find a USP.

In a competitive market, especially for parity products (example: credit cards), finding a USP can be challenging. Sometimes it’s good enough to claim the high ground with a benefit statement so clearly stated that any competitor who says “wait a minute, we have that too” will look foolish. (You never heard Reese’s Pieces say “we don’t melt either.”) Also, remember that your competition is not restricted to competitors; it also includes doing nothing or doing without. A powerful USP will be good enough to overcome that inertia.

With this post we’re back to my series based on the “Copywriting that Gets Results” class I teach for the Direct Marketing Association. Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

Why you should send your copywriters and designers to trade shows

Colleague Carol Worthington Levy just wrote a great piece in the LENSER newsletter on the benefits of sending creative employees to conferences such as the DMA’s annual event. I’m a big fan of this and in fact I send my entire creative department, i.e. myself, to an average half-dozen trade shows per year.

But as Carol points out, most creatives don’t go to conferences because the management won’t let them. The suits are afraid of being caught short-handed while the lead designer or writer is out of the office, or maybe they’re just tight fisted. As a result, the few creative events the Direct Marketing Association has tried to put on have languished.

Here are four good reasons copywriters (and designers) should get to go to trade shows:

1. To see how the competition is advertising. In the petri dish of the exhibit hall you can quickly get a cross-section of images and messages your competitors are using to market… and better yet, you can see how the audience reacts by gauging the floor traffic.

2. To see your audience in the wild. I don’t know about you, but when I write I frequently have an imaginary picture of my prospect in my mind. It makes the copywriting task more focused. So what could be better than actually seeing real prospects to add detail to that visualization?

3. To see what hot buttons work for your audience. Hang back when a product demo is going… observe the phrases the demo person is using and how the recipient of the demo reacts. This is a great way to find out what is truly important about a complex product so you can use it effectively in your own selling.

4. To learn something new. I am generally pretty disappointed in the educational sessions at conferences (other than SXSW, and even that had some clinkers this year). But if you look at learning as a nice bonus instead of the focus, you’re OK. You’ll always learn SOMETHING new.

If you’re a laborer in the creative trenches, please pass the above list and Carol’s article along to your management. I’m doing a session at the DMA this October in San Francisco, and I’d rather not be alone in the room.

Why Facebook will buy Yelp

Robert Scoble had an example at one of the SXSW panels on how the “check-ins” we were all getting from Gowalla and Foursquare (“Jim Wood has just checked in at the Blogger’s Lounge”) could be made useful, instead of annoying.

Suppose he wants a recommendation for a barbecue place in Austin. He’s going to browse among his thousands of contacts for the handful of people who have completed the Gowalla BBQ hunt, requiring them to check in at six different BBQ spots. He can assume they know more about BBQ than 99% of the rest of us, based purely on their activity stream.

Of course, we don’t know if these reviewers have good taste in barbecue, but there are tools for that as well. It’s what is done on Amazon and Yelp, where reviewers gain authority based on how active they are and how useful their reviews are to others. Combine an authority ranking system with check-ins and you’re getting some pretty good info, all auto-generated.

The biggest user of check-ins will soon be Facebook, the 800 pound gorilla that nobody at SXSW wants to talk about even though they reccently surpassed Google as the #1 Internet destination on the Web in terms of daily visits. Facebook users are already conditioned to share their activity streams with their friends anecdotally, and Gowalla and Twitter are adding links to make those streams geographically meaningful (Gowalla through geolocation, Twitter through its newly added “location” feature). You’ll know how popular your local Starbucks is with your friends and how often your best friends can be found there.

And wouldn’t it be great to add to this a coolness factor, what the smart and savvy kids are recommending? Well, that’s what Yelp is for. How about adding a Yelp tab at the top of your Facebook page where, after you visit a place, you can Yelp it? How about assigning reward points for the frequency of Yelp reviews; wouldn’t that be at least as satisfying as feeding the animals in Farmville?

Facebook also gains a bunch of new users (plus many already on Facebook who will become much more active) and a sales force trained in micro-targeting local businesses. It’s just too good a fit not to happen.

How to make your CEO a better blogger

Your CEO/boss/client wants to have a blog (or maybe just be on Twitter), and that’s a fine idea. An informal but authoritative voice for the company is a great way to engage customers, especially if it’s on an otherwise dry corporate website. Unfortunately, your boss’ blog posts are REALLY DULL… or, worse, sound like best of breed innovative corporate b.s. What to do?

I asked this question of the panel in the fabulous “Marketing Goes Social” panel at today’s South by Southwest Interactive. And got some great answers. Here they are as quick as I could transcribe them. As you’ll see, most are clever gambits to get an egoistic executive to take an objective view of their work. DMS=David Meerman Scott. NB=USAF Capt. Nathan Broshear. MB=customer service specialist Melanie Baker.

1. Ask them to sit down and show you how they use the Internet… what sites they visit, whether they’re on Facebook and what their update stream looks like, who they follow on Twitter. This gives them the opportunity to realize the content of interest to them may be very different than what they’re putting out. [DMS]

2. Find ANOTHER blog or site that is very similar to your CEO’s and critique it together. Through this third-party bashing you can make valid points without making the boss defensive. [DMS]

3. Take two highlighters of two different colors and track a printout of your CEO’s blog. Put everything that’s self serving in one color, everything customer focused in the other color. Review it with the CEO. [DMS]

4. Ask them why they want to have a blog in the first place. The person writing should be the one who has the story… in the military that would be a sergeant in the field vs a general officer. In a company it might not be the CEO, especially if they’re writing for their ego gratification. [NB]

5. Show them some of the resources the Air Force has produced on how to intelligently engage with the public through social media. If it’s good enough for our armed forces, it should be good enough for your boss. [that’s mine, but I got a fist pump from NB when I mentioned it.]

6. Ask CEO to tell you what questions people ask about the company. Then suggest blog posts on that. [MB]

Facebook as silent majority

Here’s a good strategy for working a conference as unpredictable as South by Southwest Interactive. Give yourself an assignment, e.g. a resource you need to find or a topic you learn about, then refer back to it whenever there’s a choice to be made in your activity flow.

The Silent Majority: Facebook developers at SXSWi

Here are my two. First, I wanted to find out about Facebook and SXSW. Specifically, I wanted to follow up on my hypothesis that while it is a vast online community, people in the geek world don’t want to talk about Facebook because it runs on a proprietary platform. I started by putting up a #Facebook #sxsw hashtag search in TweetDeck and watching the traffic. Yep, not a lot of it. I did run across the Facebook Developer Garage off site event and spent a couple of hours there yesterday. Show of hands requested from the audience: how many of you are Facebook developers? (almost everybody) How many actually use Facebook? (quite a lot fewer.)

We all love Twitter because it’s an erector set, but meanwhile Facebook is Dad’s muscle car (or maybe Mom’s) idling in the driveway. You can’t ignore 400 million users indefinitely. Josh from Gowalla got cheers on the stage and everybody loves Josh/Gowalla and how they now have their Facebook Connect check-in. So what happens in a few months when Facebook introduces its own check-in feature?

Meanwhile, my second assignment was related to the fact that several folks have recently asked me about being a social media consultant for them. I’m not sure it’s a good fit because social media marketing requires constant attention (similar to good P.R.) and as a freelance copywriter I sometimes need to hole up for a couple of days at a time. So I wanted to find folks who actually are social media consultants and are good at it. Through the #facebook #sxsw tag I ran across the the folks at The KBuzz. I went to their mixer to meet them and talked to some of their clients and was impressed. Mallorie Rosenbluth is their Director of Small Business which is what most of my inquires would be; for $1000 they will design a Facebook page for you and do a detailed analysis of your business and your social media opportunities, then provide recommendations which you can execute on your own or through a monthly contract with them.

Check them out. UPDATE: Mallorie contacted me to say that if you use the code OTIS10 they’ll give you 10% off above pricing.

Social breadcrumbs from my first day at SXSWi

Breadcrumbs are those little links you see on a website that help you to retrace your steps; “social breadcrumbs” is a phrase Jeremiah Owyang came up with (new to me anyway) a few minutes ago to describe the cumulative record of your presence you leave in social media that can be followed up by your friends or others interested in your activities or wanting to know what you would recommend. This was from the best panel I attended today, except it was in stealth mode. Supposedly Brian Solis as sole speaker but @jowyang, @comcastcares and some heavy dude from FourSquare were all up there unannounced talking about how to listen to the customer in social media.

This is what is so frustrating and fascinating about South by Southwest: the unpredictability. Before I got to this panel, halfway done, I had walked out on two completely packed rooms presenting astonishingly basic insights on how Google developers work long distance and what web content is all about. You just don’t know.

My other accomplishment so far is to run into and spend time with the folks from The Startup Bus: “25 strangers board a bus in San Francisco – and at 60 miles an hour and over 48 hours – they are to conceive, build and launch 6 tech startups in time for a SxSW party in Austin.” In other words, you got a free ride to the show in return for agreeing to put together and pitch a concept with several other people you’ve never seen before. The teams are presenting their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists tonight.

Also, the registration process is much less stressed this year, even though anecdotally there are more people. Stay tuned and I’ll report if I run into anything else interesting.

Hmm… possible problem with social media peer reviews

Go look at the reviews for a popular item on Amazon.com. Compare the volume of people voting on the “most helpful favorable review” and the “most helpful critical review”. In most cases, the number of “helpful” votes on the “favorable” reviews will swamp the “critical” numbers. My hypothesis: people reading these reviews mostly want to support their own positive impression because they’ve already decided to buy the item.

Some time ago, I accepted an invitation to be a “Vine” reviewer on Amazon. This honor came to me because I had written a couple of reviews on the site that got a high number of “helpful” ratings. Now I get a monthly email offering me some products for free as long as I agree to review them. This is not a boondoggle: if you regard your time as worth anywhere close to minimum wage, the hours you spend in reviewing the items are going to be far more than the value of the goods received.

But here’s the thing. Most of my Vine reviews have been negative and POSSIBLY as a result I’m getting less attractive Vine offers now. I have no ideas how this algorithm works. Maybe Amazon merchants are subsidizing this effort in some way? I’m certainly not suggesting that there has been any pressure to give a positive review but maybe Amazon is able to say “we’ll offer your product to a certain number of our top reviewers, they’ll likely review it favorably because they’re getting it for free etc.” In any case the net result is that fewer people are giving me a “helpful” nod now and I’m less well-rated as a reviewer since I started to write more negative reviews.

I love peer reviews and am a frequent contributor to Yelp, as well as Amazon. I read and use these reviews in my own buying decisions. If I want to know how to do some trick with a kitchen gadget that came with a poor instruction manual, I can bet that an Amazon reviewer will have filled in the gaps. But Amazon and other social media outlets need to make sure they provide a venue for intelligent negative opinions to express themselves, even if those reviews are not beloved by the readership. Maybe a helpful negative review gets extra weight, if it’s of a certain length and not a rant?

Facebook: the 400 million pound gorilla

I did a workshop last week for the DMA on social media. It was called “I’m on Twitter and Facebook, now what? How to REALLY put social media to work for your business.” The premise is that a lot of businesses jumped into social media marketing in 2009 without really thinking through what it was all about, and 2010 is the year they’ll now get analytic and practical about it.

In fact, I found that a lot of attendees are using social media, especially Twitter, to promote their businesses. They are tweeting offers, news related to their products, and links of interest to their market. Yet few of these marketers said they regularly use Twitter themselves. I think you need to walk the walk: you can’t effectively use the medium unless you invest time in participating in the user experience by being a user.

Meanwhile, almost nobody including me was paying proper attention to Facebook. This is dangerously short sighted. Facebook is amazingly successful, approaching 400 active million users of whom 50% sign on every day. A single Facebook application, Farmville, has more users than Twitter. But Facebook seems so consumer focused that many of the business marketers in the room can’t take it seriously.

The other thing is that, while Twitter is easy to play around with, Facebook is very rigid in what you can and can’t do. Twitter is the PC (or maybe the Unix workstation), Facebook is the Mac. It’s their way or the highway. But the “page” tools (used to build what used to be a “fan page”) and Ad Manager are so easy to use it is a low time investment to try them out.

Nielsen reported that 13% of 2010 Winter Olympics viewers were online while watching the competitions, and of those 40% were “Facebooking”. That is a term I first heard during the Super Bowl when the hostess of the party we attended was disappointed my wife hadn’t brought her laptop so they could Facebook with their friends about what snacks were being served, how boring the game was etc. Of course your could do this on Twitter but why? On Facebook you’re among a cozy circle of friends and there’s no 140 cc limit.

The PowerPoint of my DMA workshop is available here. Look at it in slide view mode, because almost every image is a clickable hyperlink.

The Amish marketing miracle… sadly, debunked

As a copywriter, I get goosebumps from promos like the “Amish Miracle Fireplace” full page ad which has been running of late. This is the Ronco/Popiel school of long form copy I pored over when I was learning my trade. (In fact, I once interviewed at the Ronco offices in North Hollywood. I recall they had the various examples of their direct marketing prowess… the Veg-o-Matic, Pocket Fisherman and more… lined up on a shelf like Teddy Roosevelt’s African hunting trophies). As a cub copywriter I felt these ads were more audacious than deceptive… they were so entertaining in their own right that no one should feel cheated if they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Ad for Amish Miracle Fireplace, from consumeraffairs.com

The Amish Miracle Fireplace copywriter would have old Sam Popiel sitting up in his grave and saluting. The miracle is the heater being promoted in the ad, which puts out a high level of radiant heat for such a tiny object and will be yours FREE as long as you buy a wooden box/mantle to house it, which is the part made by the Amish. A little sleuthing gets to how the marketer makes money: At $300 plus shipping, the price of the box is much more than the apparent value of the “free” heater. But still. So many marketing touchpoints here: thrift, American tradition, pride of ownership in something that makes your hope more cozy, who wouldn’t want one at the bargain price of free?

Unfortunately, the folks at consumeraffairs.com have burst our bubble. Their article is a miraculous bit of digging, and along the way they respond to such consumer queries as “I thought Amish people didn’t use electricity” and “I thought Amish people didn’t allow themselves to be photographed.” They also tell us why such endorsements as UL-approved and the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval are essentially meaningless. And they point out that a device that produces the same level of electric heat (while sending your utility bill through the roof, by the way) can be bought at Target for $20.

The vice president of the company that makes the heater is interviewed in the article, and he is delightfully unrepentant. The “miracle”, he explains, is actually the imitation flames that are displayed on the front screen of the heater. “These heaters are being called a miracle because they have what’s being called the ‘Fireless Flame’ patented technology that gives you the peaceful flicker of a real fire but without any flames, fumes, smells, ashes or mess. The patented ‘Fireless Flame’ looks so real it amazes everybody,” says David Baker, of Heat Surge in Canton, OH. I happened to have spent a weekend in Canton last fall and I wish I had had the presence of mind to check out this miracle for myself.

Is it time to reinvent your brand?

A friend and colleague made me fret this morning. He visited my blog and happened to read one of my posts about Toyota where I talked about “my recent issues” with a link to another article. He naturally assumed these “issues” were related to my own branding or marketing problems, since that’s what he reads me for, and was surprised to find an article about an automotive company.

I brought this on myself, more or less intentionally, by taking what is mostly a marketing blog and turning it occasionally into a bully pulpit for my rants on other “issues”. Though I have to say that the original Prius battery failure post has become the second-most read post ever on Otisregrets. And that my food posts draw a small but loyal readership who come for nothing but the food. So I guess I will be keeping it up.

The name of this blog is a bigger problem. “Otis Regrets” has been around a long time, since 2004 when it began as a venue where students in my copywriting class could exchange ideas outside of class. The thought of making it SEO-friendly was far from my mind… what was a search engine anyway? But I’ve since become painfully aware that “Otis Regrets” is buried by queries for “Miss Otis Regrets” and you’re not likely to stumble upon this blog by name unless you’re also looking for Otis Maxwell.

So here’s the lesson or moral for today. When you put up your website, transferring a meatspace or bricks-and-mortar personal or business brand to the web, you hopefully heeded the advice to provide useful content, not puffery. But it may not have occurred to you that your very brand needed a new look. The web was just one conduit by which people are going to look for you and identify you. Now we’ve got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe Yelp, and all the Namez, Plaxos, etc etc that are going to link to these larger communities and referral services.

Think, as an example, about how your Facebook identity might show up in the newsfeed of someone who is a friend of your own friend or fan, but so far has no idea who you are. The brand needs to do some heavy lifting here. The new reader (who is a valuable referral because you’re connected through a friend) has to get an immediate positive idea of who you are and what you do. Traditional branding, even a traditional elevator pitch, takes too long.

The quality of your content… the news or activity that was quoted… has to do its part. But what about the brand itself? If it isn’t pulling its weight in terms of building instant appropriate comprehension, maybe it’s time for a change. I know I am thinking about this for my own brand, how about you?