Marketing Archives - Page 21 of 22 - Otis Regrets... or not

The middle manager

Early in my career I was direct marketing manager at a department store. The post office announced its first-ever presort discount (this tells you how long ago it was) but gave no instructions on how to prepare a mailing list to get the discount. An enterprising software company wrote an application to do the presort and they were willing to let me use it—for a finders fee of half the savings in postage.

I turned it down without a second thought, even though I could have still saved thousands of dollars. The prospect of looking like a sucker to my superiors far outweighed the financial gain. And of course the gain was to the company, while the looking foolish was on me personally.

I remembered this recently when a client wanted to do some email promotions. I did a bit of research and recommended several services that work with small lists. Then she came back to me with an objection that never would have occurred to me—what if somebody at the email service decides to steal their mailing list? Although highly unlikely, this was a big internal concern at the company and it stopped the email program in its tracks.

The concerns of middle managers are very different than those of higher up folks who have responsibility and maybe get a share of P&L. Managers are reviewed for being on time and on budget, with no unpleasant surprises. This is something to keep in mind in marketing, and also when dealing with them in person because often a direct marketing manager is your immediate client as a freelancer.

When writing a marketing letter to a middle manager, it’s a good idea to stress the absolute lack of negatives. Testimonials are priceless—your reader doesn’t want to be the first to take the plunge. Benefits like “make your job easier” and “stop users from complaining” are far more relevant than “help your company grow its revenue”.

And when you’re delivering your copy to the real-life middle manager, be on time!

“Will it last for 30 years?”

This past weekend I ran across a historical display for Southwest Airlines in a Dallas Museum. The promotional materials and “LUV Potions” cocktail menu from the 1971 launch look amusingly dated, but the planes themselves are a dead ringer for the 737 I flew home the next

day—same design pattern, same color scheme. They’re fulfilling one of David Ogilvy’s key tests for a good concept: will it last for 30 years?

It got me thinking about what a consistent brand Southwest has been over the years—not just in design but in its irreverent voice that pokes fun at itself, the flying experience, and especially mandatory FAA announcements. (My favorite example of this humorous approach was the air sickness bag with a recruiting message on it: “sick of your job?”) This is heavy lifting from the marketing department and a key reason people who don’t generally “like” airlines go out of their way to fly Southwest.

Interestingly, Southwest itself has itself gotten a little tired of its consistency recently and is moving things around. Its website was recently redesigned with a color scheme that is a reasonable evolution from its beginnings, but with broad horizontal elements and an anonymous san serif type face that remind me on one of those sites you wind up on by mistake where somebody is squatting on a URL and wants to make it look like a “real” website with links and search.

Advice to Southwest: don’t get bored with success. Remember Henry Ford’s alleged complaint to his marketing director: “I like that campaign of yours but does it have to appear so dang often?” To which the marketing director replied, “Mr. Ford, the campaign has yet to appear in print!” Continue reading ““Will it last for 30 years?””

“I want your free stuff. Please call me now.”

Would you like to put yourself in the shoes of a prospect receiving lots of marketing messages and deciding which ones to respond to? Try this: place an ad in the “free” stuff of craigslist.org.

I recently gave away a big kids’ playhouse and two perfectly good laser toner cartridges. Got over 40 responses in the playhouse (in about an hour), several each for the other item. So how did I decide who was the lucky recipient?

Some of the respondents disqualified themselves immediately with obviously automated responses that sounded like they might have been generated from some mailbot within the Russian mafia. “I want you item for my purposes. Please call my cell now 415-555-1212.” I don’t think so.

But there were lots of legitimate respondents who didn’t rise above the pack. I got a dozen or more “My kids/grandkids would love your playhouse!” so how to choose? Another issue was that I needed to know that getting rid of the item was going to be quick and easy for me. Some people said they had a van or a truck (mandatory and stated in the ad) to pick up the big playhouse; those who didn’t were automatically kicked to the curb.

The winners were a/a single mom who wanted the playhouse for her daughter who was just coming out of the hospital, and had a friend (a fireman!) who would come over right away with his truck; and b/another single mom who wanted the laser cartridge because her printer was streaking and making her kids’ homework look bad.

See the chosen motivations at work here? First they echoed the business proposition, then showed how they could uniquely meet my need to place my item in a good home. As writers, we need to be just as good at presenting our own products and services.

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….

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!