Posts filed under 'Marketing'
Sometimes people write words that mean nothing at all. And racking your brains on nothing is just like trying to divide by zero. All you end up with is a blinding headache.
That’s just what happened to Lewis Green when he read this article called Top 10 Marketing Processes for the 21st Century. Lewis’ blog post about his experience reminded me of a Richard Dawkins article called Postmodernism Disrobed, a review of the book Intellectual Impostors by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Richard doesn’t mince his words in his insightful opening paragraph.
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
Take this quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, for example.
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
Enough to give you a bad migraine on a good day! Maybe people like this are just hoping that when you give up trying to figure it out, you’ll assume that you’re the dumb one and leave it at that. The best cure for this kind of headache is prevention and the trash bin is the doctor I’d recommend.
Of course the very same thing happens in advertising - not necessarily because there is nothing to say about a company or product, but because the marketers don’t dig deep enough to find the gold. Sometimes it’s down to there not being enough budget for proper research, other times it’s just lazy marketers to blame. After all it’s easier to weave a web of spin than to build upon solid, convincing facts.
Take the trouble to make every communication with your prospects and clients as clear and meaningful as possible. Find out what you really want to say and carefully choose the best words to express your ideas in a way that is easy to understand.
Of course you can be creative! And by all means use words that conjure vivid images in your reader’s mind. But make sure that the solid foundations your argument is based on show through. Your audience will respect and trust you for that.
October 19th, 2006
Branding done well can work wonders for your company’s image.
Your business will look better, smarter, more desirable – anything you want. Invest enough in expert brand consultancy and your competition will be left to eat your dust.
But if it’s only skin deep, you’re in big trouble.
***
Seth Godin remarks about the latest ‘slimming’ feature on the new HP cameras. It doesn’t lower your cholesterol. It doesn’t make you any less prone to heart disease or diabetes either. It just makes you appear more attractive to people who don’t get to meet you in person.
***
No amount of branding can cover up bad business practice. If your products don’t perform, if your customer service is lousy… if you are not actively being your brand right down to the core, in every way and every aspect, your customers will find out.
Sooner, or later.
And when they do, all your branding efforts will only serve to bring your shortcomings into stark relief!
October 5th, 2006
It’s been a lot of work immediately before a lot of travelling and the result is that over a month has passed since my last post and, while there are reasons, I have no excuses. I have broken the ‘blog regularly’ rule – the first rule of blogging.
Last week I ran into a couple of Spanish estate agents who blatantly broke the first rule of selling.
My wife and I were in the southern Spanish countryside, looking to buy a plot of land. We had exactly one week to see as much as possible and try and choose the place where our house will one day stand when we move to be closer to her family. A hectic task – and doubly so with a 20-month old child in tow – but we managed it. In the meantime, we got to compare the sales skills of well over a dozen estate agents, and two in particular stood out for entirely the wrong reasons.
One insisted on showing us the part of the countryside where he had grown up, even though we thought it was too far away. Our opinions didn’t matter and we had to politely go on his tour and listen to how great it all was (from his point of view). That over and done with, we asked to see land in another area, closer to the town. ‘I don’t usually take people there because it’s too expensive,’ he said. Needless to say, we were shocked, and I made a mental note not to bother with this guy if I ever had anything ‘expensive’ to sell.
A girl at another agency spoke enthusiastically about how she loved this one house (never mind that we were only interested in land) and thought it was very homely because the front door led to – wait for it – the kitchen! My wife and I looked at each other in stunned desperation at how our precious time was being wasted.
And what about you? Do you offer your customers what they want or try to sell them what you think (or worse, hope) they would like? Remember the first rule of selling: find out what your customers are after and focus on how you can provide it. It sounds so simple that it is so often overlooked.
August 18th, 2006
I recently commented about the unfortunate fact that many businesses lose sales by failing to recognise the value of good copywriting.
And in another post, I touched upon the importance of testing your advertising so that you find out what works best in a particular circumstance and do more of that.
It all makes sense when you think about it.
But wouldn’t you expect me, a copywriter, to push my own trade and to even suggest that you get me to write multiple versions of your copy so we can choose the winner? After all that would mean more business for me, right?
Well, Armand Morin, one of the world’s top Internet marketers, stresses these two points when he asks, “Why is copywriting always last on the list?” I suggest you read his post and get some fine marketing wisdom straight from the horse’s mouth!
July 5th, 2006
Seth Godin blogs about the two sides to the marketing coin. Attracting attention, making an impact and creating buzz are fine, but that’s just scratching the surface. Marketing is much more than that.
The most successful marketing comes as a result of delving deeper, to present perspectives and tell stories that are truly worthwhile and so create a brand of lasting appeal.
The trouble is that many marketers simply fail to do so.
June 23rd, 2006
Marketers and copywriters strive to differentiate a particular product from the competition and get consumers to switch brands. It’s not just their job, it’s their whole raison d’être.
Enter one of the sharpest tools in the marketing box: the Unique Selling Proposition. Rosser Reeves, author of Reality in Advertising, coined the term to refer to a product’s one major benefit that makes it stand out from the crowd. By dramatising the Unique Selling Proposition and stressing it again and again, marketers get consumers to view that feature as unique to the brand, and thus to view that brand as unique. When consumers perceive the USP as sufficiently important, they are encouraged to change brands.
Herbert Ahrend, founder of Ahrend Associates, says that even when a product is similar (or possibly inferior) to the competition’s, it can be differentiated by making a Unique Selling Proposition out of a feature that competitors have not stressed.
Bob Bly illustrates this with an interesting anecdote in his book The Copywriter’s Handbook.
Once, a copywriter visited a brewery in the hopes of learning something that could set the brewery’s beer apart from other beers. He was fascinated to discover that beer bottles – like milk containers – are washed in live steam to kill the germs. Although all brands of beer are purified this way, no other manufacturer had stressed this fact. So the copywriter wrote about a beer so pure that the bottles are washed in live steam, and the brew’s Unique Selling Proposition was born.
Seth Godin recently mentioned a couple of other examples where product features that are common to all brands are turned into a particular brand’s Unique Selling Proposition. Seth blogs about ads for ‘line-caught swordfish’ and ‘antibiotic-free eggs’, when all swordfish is caught using fishing lines and no eggs contain antibiotics. He adds:
Sometimes, marketers add a label where no label is needed. And that label is an effective way to highlight something about the product (or hide something).
And very effective it can be too!
I am sure you can think of a huge number of restaurants, where the food is by far Finger Licking Better than KFC’s. Yet, the Unique Selling Proposition that KFC’s food is so good that you will want to lick it off your fingers is so ingrained in the consumer’s mind that any marketing campaign by another brand based on that particular premise is surely doomed to failure.
So, what’s so special about what you’re selling? If you can’t tell me right off the bat, you’ve got some serious thinking to do!
June 22nd, 2006
Reading David Garfinkel’s post Plagarism? Or Creative Adaptation? Or Neither? reminded me of the adage that there are no new ideas – just adaptations of old ones. Not that I can say I entirely agree with that. Want an example? Einstein.
David says:
In direct marketing copywriting, we always strive to build our message on structures, concepts and actual words that have worked before. It’s no crime.
Hey, in this business, swiping is admired.
In other words, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. In a highly competitive environment such as direct marketing, where performance is meticulously tracked for maximum results, small tweaks and changes to past efforts are much less risky than all-out innovation.
Of course, different established methods, as well as choice of media and other variables, should be evaluated against each other whenever time and budget allow. This holds true for all kinds of advertising and not just for direct mail. After all, anything, from a different audience, a different culture, or even something apparently trivial such as a different time of the year, can throw a tried-and-tested marketing campaign completely off track.
In a nutshell, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but test, test and test again to make sure everything still runs at least as well as you expect it to.
June 21st, 2006
The lovely, sub-tropical, Spanish island of Gran Canaria has all the makings of a freelance copywriter’s paradise. Thousands of businesses need to communicate with the millions of tourists who visit each year. A third of these visitors come from the UK or from the, largely English-proficient, Scandinavian countries so, as an expatriate copywriter, my work schedule ought to be jam packed with local writing jobs, right?
Wrong!
In the course of my networking efforts I have come to realise a rather bitter truth that has forced me to look elsewhere for business. Spanish entrepreneurs and marketing folk have absolutely no clue about copywriting. Much less do they realise the vital role it should play as an integral part of their marketing efforts. There probably are some exceptions to this rule, but, my luck being what it is, I still have to come across them.
From multi-million dollar hotels to family-run diving schools, the response has been the same. Many think that a 10-cent-per-word translation service will do the trick of getting their message through to the English-speakers and convert these prospects into clients. Worse still, others say that they have ‘someone who has studied English’ on their payroll and so they’re covered, thank you very much. The very same goes for businesses in mainland Spain too.
Not even the franchises of giant international corporations like McDonald’s seem to be free from the economise-on-the-writing syndrome, as you can see from the photo of a sign that I took during a recent stroll by the beach.
Now, a trivial gaffe on a McDonald’s sign is more likely to elicit a few chuckles than to put a sunburned family off their fast-food calorie fix. Still, the fact remains that Spanish businesses at large are failing to make the most of the huge amounts of money they spend on marketing. Just like the fisherman who buys a top-dollar fishing rod only to skimp on the bait, they blow their budget on glitzy marketing campaigns and then make do with fast-food copywriting that’s all fat and no muscle. Hardly a thought about their message, how to deliver it effectively and how to make sure it achieves the effect they want it to have.
Then they sit and wonder why no one is biting!
Of course, the Spanish are not alone in the quagmire of ineffective communication. Even in the English-speaking world, many people who should know better still have to understand the simple fact of the matter. Just like the serious fisherman cannot do without prime fishing bait, quality copywriting is absolutely crucial for businesses that are determined to attract as many clients as possible and pays for itself many times over in terms of results.
Are you one of the unenlightened? I hope not!
June 19th, 2006
This morning I read something I am still struggling to believe. Seth Godin has been left wondering why on Earth did Continental give him a freebee of 10 song downloads from iTunes as a thank you for a plane ticket he bought. I think Seth must have skipped his Sunday morning coffee. Or maybe it’s the jet-lag!
To me it seems pretty obvious that Continental and iTunes are just doing some run-of-the-mill mutual back-scratching in the marketing department.
For Seth to enjoy his free downloads he has to visit the iTunes website, download and install iTunes on his computer and even enter an e-mail address on their website. In other words he has to become an iTunes prospect. If he already happens to be a customer, he gets to return to their online shop anyway – possibly buying some other stuff – so there’s potential gain there too.
Continental, on the other hand are simply offering customers an incentive to fly their airline – or pleasantly surprising unknowing customers like Seth.
How much sugar would you like with your coffee, Seth? This one’s on me.
P.S. My guess is that the drab copywriting in Continental’s promotional e-mail has nothing to do with dissuading people from taking advantage of the free downloads. Just shoddy work by a copywriter who forgot to put the magic word ‘free’ in the subject line.
June 18th, 2006
Sala Aharef, a young artist working out of a small studio in Zurich, Switzerland, must surely be the envy of anyone who has ever struggled to sell a single painting. That’s just what went through my mind when I read about him a few weeks ago on Seth Godin’s blog. Sala has sold over five hundred of his works in four months flat! All thanks to an ingenious idea that lends itself to some highly effective (or should I say infectious?) viral marketing.
What he did was to get hold of one thousand identical canvasses, paint a unique number from 1 to 1000 on each one and put them all up for sale on www.onethousandpaintings.com.
Technically demanding? Not at all. Monotonous? Maybe. Effective? You bet!
Arguably, any random squiggle is closer to being a masterpiece than a plain blue number painted onto a white background. However, what makes Sala’s work stand out is the concept – and the courage he had to do something so apparently ridiculous that nobody would even dream of in the first place.
In a society that is taught (and generally expected) to conform, avoid risk, and to stick to the beaten path, it is natural to look up to anyone who manages to pull off something that sounds impossible. People are inspired by stories that tell of success against all odds. And what Sala is selling is the chance for anyone who has a few bucks to spare to become part of something daring – and at the same time outrageously successful – without even leaving their armchair. What Sala is really selling are thrills!
In fact, the very outrageousness of this project is the seed of its success. It sounds so crazy that you want to tell your friends about it – and they want to tell their friends – and the whole thing balloons and suddenly hundreds of paintings are sold almost overnight. That’s viral marketing, and it’s very powerful indeed!
Sala’s art is not in the paintings themselves. His idea is 100% of his art. And the idea’s potential to turn viral is 99% of the project’s success. This brings us to the remaining (and crucial) 1% – blogs, and the amazing power they have to spread messages around.
Brian Baute describes how, after over three months of stagnation, Sala’s painting sales shot right through the roof within a few days of BoingBoing, Digg and Seth Godin – and eventually hundreds of other bloggers – spreading the word about his one thousand paintings. Take a look at the sales graph on Brian’s blog and see for yourself.
It seems as though Sala might have never made it (or at best would have been in for a very long wait) were it not for the incredible efficiency of blogs to transmit his viral message to the masses.
Now there’s some food for thought if you’re looking for some great publicity for your business!
June 17th, 2006
