Category: Marketing

Trade Show Tactics

We’re coming up on January, which has become my big trade show month since the demise of Comdex. I’ll go to the Consumer Electronics Show first, followed by a quick stop at Macworld, and then the Fancy Food Show at the end of the month. What am I looking for, other than schwag and free food?

First, I want to see how companies I work with—or their competitors—get the attention of the audience through elevator pitches or booth design. And second, I want to watch other show-goers who may well be my audience at some point to see what questions they ask and what “hot buttons” cause their faces to light up. It’s also nice to put a face with abstract stats so I can have a mental image of my reader, next time I write to Dear IT Manager or whatever.

In my copywriting class we talk a little about trade show booth design for smaller companies—something that increasingly seems to be the responsibility of the marketing folks who are my students. It’s not easy to create a visual “home” out of nothing that can be erected and disassembled quickly. One thing I’ve noticed is that faces help—big photos of people who look like your users, making eye contact with the show traffic. Not enough companies do this so it’s very easy to make yourself stand out.

Also, too little attention is paid to booth traffic patterns. If you stand behind a high counter, you’re creating the metaphor of a store checkout—people will not approach unless they’re already committed to doing business, which eliminates most potential booth visitors. If you put up registration kiosks at the outside corners, or entry points framed by signs, you’ve created a boundary that may keep people out.

As a show floor troller, I tend to be wary of a big and empty booth—I assume that they don’t have much to offer and that if I go in I’m guaranteed to be hit with a sales pitch. But I find a booth with higher traffic irresistible, because I want to see what the buzz is all about. You can do this with good visual design and a seamless traffic pattern. Oh, and free samples of artisanal cheese will help.

Inside the Baby Boomer cranium

I recently celebrated a Significant Birthday, and celebrated by ordering myself a 30 GB video iPod. Shortly thereafter, I cancelled that order and purchased a refurbished iPod mini.

My reasons say something about selling to baby boomers, a demographic that has marketers salivating because of its size and presumed affluence. The initial impetus for my buyer’s remorse was a search to find ways to import DVD video to an iPod. After finding out it might take a weekend to convert a feature length film, I began to wonder what was wrong with watching a film on my computer or even (drum roll)… the TV.

It also occurred to me that at 4 GB, the iPod Mini has space for all the tunes I am ever likely to listen to. I was attracted the renowned reliability of the Mini and also some potential redundancy—my wife already has a Mini and I like the idea of making use of her various docks, chargers etc.

So. Here we see a Baby Boomer who is attracted by simplicity, the very idea of not doing something he could. That represents a real turning point for me, who has always bought the buggy 1.0 release of everything. Simplicity also means the confidence something is going to work as it should, nothing more and nothing less. That’s also something you don’t get with the newest cutting edge product. The Mini is in fact a long-discontinued product, yet still popular on eBay and occasionally available at the Apple outlet.

By the way, this new iPod is replacing an iPod shuffle which is a great product when you recognize what it actually is: a competitively priced USB thumb drive that comes with a free MP3 player, software and headphones. My only problem with the shuffle is that I want to quickly locate the track I want to play. “Surprise me” is also not a pleasing concept to the baby boomer. My daily life has had plenty of surprises. Give me simplicity and predictability, and my wallet opens like a May flower.

Why Steve Jobs is a (marketing) genius

The next time you open your iBook, MacBook or WhateverBook, note the orientation of the Apple logo on the top. It’s upside down! Wouldn’t it be more elegant to have it right side up, from the perspective of the user?

In fact, it used to be thus with earlier generations of Mac laptops… until the return of Steve Jobs. He recognized that it’s more important to present the brand to those who have not yet purchased than to current users. THEY see the logo right-side-up now. And it’s maybe a bonus to those who want to be cool that there is no question we are using an Apple rather than some other kind of inverted fruit.

I recently heard an interesting story from an Apple design engineer who happened to be working the night Steve returned to Apple, in 1997. (It was a Sunday.) They showed him a work in progress called the Nancy, an all-in-one computer. They explained how it was a network device in development. No it’s not, said Steve. This is our new consumer PC.

And so was born the iMac….

Thank you for your business. Now goodbye.

The 5/22 mail brought a letter from AT&T Universal Card. I almost didn’t open it because it was preprinted “OPEN IMMEDIATELY: Important Account Notice” and had a preprinted first class indicia. Obviously, another of the cash advance check mailings I receive 4x a year or so.

But no. The letter inside began: “Citi, the issuer of your AT&T Universal Cash Rewards Card, has decided to discontinue this credit card for business reasons. Therefore, your account will be closed on 6/30/06. This letter outlines important information about he closing of your account.” And so it did… several single spaced paragraphs to inform me what happens to my cardmember benefits (mostly going away) and outstanding balance (it’s still there) before a final “thank you for your business” at the end.

Now let’s see here. I’ve had this card for maybe 20 years. As I recall it was a pioneer—the first high limit, fee free MasterCard. Over the years it changed hands several times and various institutions paid what would add up to several billion dollars for the customer portfolio and brand identification. And now suddenly it’s worth no more than a curt “thank you for your business” ?

Ironically, the very same day brought an email from AT&T Universal Card. They want to let me know that I should refinance my home at a low home equity rate through them because, as a Universal Card customer, “you’ve earned it!”

That quotidian email is an example of why marketers believe business relationships have value—especially when you have the kind of relationship that gives you legal permission to send an email solicitation to your customer list. Yet, I’m assuming this will be the last I hear from my friends at Universal Card. (The deadline for my loan application is 6/30, which makes sense because my card relationship goes kablooie then.)

Citi evidently believes the Universal Card no longer has any business value. I disagree. Anybody want to join me and take up a collection to buy the brand? I’m hoping $1000 will do it.

Best in the world UPDATE

After I wrote about how you could not find Google Adwords results for “best (x) in the world”, I went and tried the Adwords registration process myself. I found that I could not use “best” in my own ad because comparatives are not allowed unless from a third party. I COULD choose “world’s best copywriter” as a search phrase, but Google warned me my results would be so low that a CPC could not be calculated. That was around March 12.

But as of today (4/19/06), something’s changed. If you look up “best copywriter in the world” you will find lots of sidebar ads. 8 on each of the first two pages, 2 on the third page. I don’t actually think that all those people got the idea from my blog. More likely something has changed in the bowels of Google.

But I’ll stand with my original thought: nobody wants to hear you talk about how great you are, and the folks who do happen to click on these ads are not going to turn into leads. Let’s watch and see what happens over time…

The price of security

I was recently a victim of identity theft. First, my credit card company called me wondering why I had been charging so much at walmart.com. When I said I hadn’t used my walmart.com account since 2004 (which I know because I keep all my old emails), they suggested somebody had gotten hold of my credit card info and suggested I cancel my account and get a new card. Which I did.

Then, a few days later, another call. Had I changed my billing address to somewhere in Arizona? No, I hadn’t, and the ability to do so meant that somebody had hacked my online account with the bank in a major way. This set off alarm bells requiring cancellation of the new card, plus alerts to the credit reporting bureaus of which maybe the worse repercussion for me, as a marketer, is that I am automatically removed from credit card solicitation lists for the next 5 years. (No more Capital One swipe samples for me!)

I thought the whole matter was handled just about right by CitiBank. They were efficient, not accusatory, and the paperwork required (two notarized statements from me) was tedious but reasonable under the circumstances. That got me thinking about what is the right balance between companies protecting themselves and providing benefits to consumers.

A serious lack of such balance was exhibited in my first purchase recently of a “digital edition” from Amazon. It came with onerous digital rights management (DRM) protection that requires me to go through a complex registration process, where I sign in with Adobe online, simply to be able to read the document I have paid for on my computer. It simply ain’t worth it, folks. I asked for my money back. Their rights are protected but they lose a sale. Good deal? Not for me, not for the publisher, certainly not for the author who probably has no idea this is going on.

Back in my “suit” days, I had a client who asked me if it would be a good idea to sign up with a bad check protection service which would make good any bogus paper in return for a 1.5 percent commission on ALL checks received. Sounded somewhat plausible until we did the math and found that the bad check problem was actually costing considerably less than 1.5% of sales.

People who make their living trying to cheat other people and businesses will probably find a way to do so, at least some of the time. A business needs to find a balance where it makes things somewhat more difficult for the bad guys without penalizing the average customer with unreasonable security measures. This is the same logic that applies when we talk to our clients about money-back guaranteed, isn’t it?

A money back guarantee, especially on a mail order or internet purchase, answers the big objection “what if I get it and I don’t like it after I see it?” Marketers who are reluctant to make guarantees are afraid that somebody is going to take advantage of them. But the bad guys will anyway… and meanwhile they’ve scared off a lot of potential customers who were on the fence.

Best in the World

We’ve all had clients who think the way to open a sales letter is to say, “As the world leader in intelligent solutions that do xyz, Acme Systems would like you to know blah blah etc…”

There are two obvious problems with this strategy. The first is that chest-pounding self-importance tends to put people off, not endear them. Readers want to know “what’s in it for me?”, not how great you think you are. And the second is that claims of superiority are not credible unless they are a/supported by hard facts and b/proffered by someone other than the person or company being judged.

You wouldn’t want to throw it in your client’s face that their self-centric posturing (which probably comes straight from the CEO’s corner office) is going to doom their campaign before it gets started, so here’s some useful third party validation: the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, which chose as their slogan for the recently-concluded Winter Games “Best in the World”.

The slogan didn’t say anything about the team’s passion or aspirations, as something so uninspired as “Striving to Be Our Best” might have done. It’s generic, anybody could have said it, and the only way it could have been remotely acceptable would be if you actually were best in the world, which our boys and girls demonstrably weren’t. So it became an object of ridicule, until ultimately Austrian skier Herman Maier, who actually is, shouted “best in the world!” from his victory podium.

Oh, here’s another objective test you can try with your client. Look up “best [insert your client’s business description] in the world” on Google and notice how many Adwords classified ads appear on the side. There almost certainly will be no ads at all. Try it with several variations and it will be the same. Meaning that everyone who has tried marketing to the phrase has abandoned it and it’s not even worth paying 1 cent for the top position. Best in the world, indeed.

Nuts for the super bowl

The Wall Street Journal’s advertising column (2/3/06) ran an item noting that Emerald Nuts had spent a fifth of its ad budget last year on a single spot in the 2005 Super Bowl, and as a result sales more than doubled in the 10 months that followed. Actually, the column didn’t say “as a result” but that was the implication since no other information was given to explain the sales increase.

It’s more likely that Emerald Nuts used the same formula that is described for this coming year: use its cachet as a “Super Bowl Advertiser” to gain shelf space, promote tie-ins to the event, and forge alliances with other, bigger marketers. So the few mill for the spot in the game are leveraged to make its participation look far bigger than it actually was.

Compare that to the Gillette “Fusion” razor that was introduced with an elaborate spot in the 2006 game. The next day I got an email inviting me to “Experience Fusion” by clicking through to a rich media website that took forever to load and then was pretty silly… a giant razor rotating on a stand while an out-of-sync Vanna White avatar invited me to check it out. Zzz.

And what was missing? The coupon, of course, to clinch the deal and get me to try it. P&G did have a sweepstakes but you can tell their heart wasn’t in it because the stakes were small and the copy flabby and generic: “enter the Ultimate Sports Fan Sweepstakes for a chance to win $7,500 in cash to spend on other good stuff: a big screen TV, season tickets to your team’s games-you name it.” If the copywriter can’t get excited about the offer, you can bet the audience won’t either.

P.S. Clicking on the title of this post will give you a look at the sweeps; if you want to meet animatronic Vanna she’s waiting right here.

The S*uper Bowl of copywriting!

Coupon FSIs (freestanding inserts) in the Sunday paper are like Toontown—a separate reality where the colors are garish, the actions outsized, and stories don’t quite make sense. This is especially evident around Super Sunday, when we are asked to believe that across America Big Game hosts are training to lay out a spectacular feed based on branded products.

In the highly competitive FSI pages where package goods makers vie for our attention, you can count on the writers of heads and taglines to rise to outsized brilliance. Thus we have “roll out big game flavors” and “the easy game plan!” (Totino pizza rolls), “Score big when you serve Boboli… the football party favorite!”, “the big game plan…lineup the great taste of Dean’s dips” (this one has a diagram of wings and ruffles going for the goal line, and an invitation to download your own football tablecloth pattern at www.deansdips.com), “kick off your party with Farmer John’s hot dogs”, “savor the taste of victory” with Cattlemen’s Barbecue Sauce, “enjoyed by BBQ experts and football fans everywhere”, “is your sandwich dressed for game day?” with French’s mustard and of course “it’s CRUNCH time” with Mt. Olive…”the super pickle for the super game.”

What makes the copywriting stars shine even brighter is the fact that none of these ads can actually mention the Super Bowl by name, since they didn’t pay for licensing rights. The results are doing a full court press on my taste buds (oops, wrong metaphor) but I’m holding out for an invitation to “throw the MVP—most valuable PARTY” with the ultimate Kraft 7 Layer Dip (heart attack on a platter) and Game Day Football Cake made with extra-strength Maxwell House coffee and dressed with Cappuccino Pudding Frosting. Call the trainer—this playah is DOWN!

This ad stinks…and I can prove it!

A recent email from Doug Stine, a copywriting colleague in Albuquerque:

“My question is this: The time tested techniques of
direct mail copywriting seem so fraudulent to me, yet
“research” says that they work. What’s the scoop?

“I recently received a direct mail piece ostensibly
from Tommy Franks. The teaser on the 9×12 envelope
was “check enclosed.” I opened the envelope. It was
a check for $1 and a solicitation to send money to the
cause. I felt deceived.

“It was a four-page letter. I know that research
(although I can’t find any of this research) shows
that people respond more to longer copy. Yet the last
thing I wanted to read was a letter “from the desk of
Tommy Franks” which I KNEW was not written by Tommy
Franks but a copywriter.

“The result? I tossed it in the trash.

“So my big question is this: why are these crap
mailers considered time-tested techniques? Am I
really in that much of the minority that I see through
these gimmicks? Are there enough people that respond
to these frauds that make them financially worthwhile?

“Is there really anyone in the U.S. who would say. “Oh,
WOW, a letter from the desk of Tommy Franks. I think
I’ll read the entire letter and send $400 to the
cause.” Are people that stupid?”

MY RESPONSE:

“I’d love to confirm that the “time tested techniques” really are fraudulent… But I can’t. One of the things about direct mail copywriting that is both a curse and a blessing is its measurability.

“We don’t get to say something is brilliant just because we think, as writers, it’s creative when the client who pays for it has the numbers to prove nobody is moved to respond. And the flip side is that we can’t say something is crap from a response standpoint if the numbers prove it works. (Though we can certainly say it is crap from a perspective of personal taste. But direct mail is expensive, and nobody’s going to pay us for creating a creative masterpiece that won’t get response. At least they won’t pay us twice.)

“I haven’t seen the Tommy Franks piece you describe but the format suggests something that has a lot of money behind it, so if you’re seeing it that probably means it has gone through repeated testing and trial by fire. And I can tell you the “real check” is indeed a proven and effective device even though it may seem phony to you. The Pavlovian response is to start salivating at the prospeet of free money, followed by a flood of tears when you realize someone else needs the money much more. (Which reminds me of one of my favorite teasers, done by a writer at Russ Reid: “Christmas gift enclosed. But not for you.”)”

Comments? Tommy Frank, if you’re reading, what do YOU think?