http://www.whois3.com/blog/ Copyright 2010 info@whois3.com http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/when_the_economy_gets_weird_get_back_to_basics/ (Note: This is an entry we wrote in 2008, but it's still relevant today.) Often when communications firms are asked by clients and media, “what should businesses do when the economy takes a bad turn?,” the standard answer is, “don’t cut back your marketing and advertising.” Unfortunately, this answer is not only biased, but may not be good advice at all. A far better reply is “get back to basics.” And nothing is more basic than evaluating those 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Product: Are you providing the right benefit? Is your product affected positively or negatively when your customers are feeling a financial pinch? If your product is a luxury item, the answer might not be a comfortable one. However, if you have a product that people tend to buy less of during difficult times, you need to look at the product, and more specifically its benefits to your consumer. Consider how you might position your product to make it a more advantageous one during a rough economy: Does it provide more benefits than simply luxury? You may want to adjust your positioning to reflect those benefits that, prior to a negative economy, may have been secondary. Price: Is it right? Okay, here comes a tough one. If you are sitting in a warehouse full of products that are no longer moving, you may want to consider adjusting your price, changing the framework of the purchase, or reducing your production costs. This may be a simple proposition – lower the price. Or maybe you can find a way to enable people to purchase your product over time or with additional incentives. Another thought: Is there a way to lower your production costs without compromising quality? Break out your old supply-demand curve and make sure you know where your price needs to be. You may have to narrow your profit/sale in the short term, but keep on top of it and you can weather the storm with a solid price strategy. Place: Are people finding you in the right spaces? If you have a traditional product distribution model, now might be the time to change where consumers can access your product. As an example, many businesses continue to rely on pushing their products through traditional placement with retailers, while more and more people go to the Internet to find deals and value in their purchases. If you haven’t fully flushed out this distribution model, now is the time to ramp it up. But whether you’re changing where people find your products/services or getting away from “tradition,” make sure you think about how and when people will be happy to find and purchase your product. Then work to put your product in their way. Promotion: Which tactics are working hardest? Finally, we come to the questions we hear most often as an advertising agency. Should ad (promotions) spending be cut? The answer is, “it depends.” When sales are going well, we tend to keep adding to our mix of promotional tactics (direct sales, print, radio, interactive, etc.) without always scrutinizing the value they are providing. There is no better time to review our tactics. The kicker is that it is difficult to measure the value each tactic is providing. Most promotional efforts do not provide specific, measurable returns in the short run, and they all work hand-in-hand together. (The reason ad budgets usually get cut first is that it is difficult to provide crystal-clear ROI, which makes it easy for an accountant to break out the red marker.) We suggest making a list of all your efforts and putting them in the order you feel they are working. You’ll want to consider how the tactics complement each other as well as bang for the buck (cost) in this list. Which tactics could be dropped in order to save short-term expense, without compromising your sales, market share and top-of-mind awareness? If you need to save some expense in order to keep people employed, pay the rent, etc., by all means cut back on the tactics that are at the bottom of your list. Sometimes a little pressure provides the best reason to make sure your marketing, and your 4 Ps, are lining up with your vision and adding to your overall business. Refining the basics can keep you heading forward in an economy that’s moving backward. 2010-01-22T18:14:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/is_your_advertising_as_smart_as_your_customers/ One of the most dangerous phrases in marketing is, “people won’t understand.” It is based on the assumption that as mass marketers, we should always speak to the lowest common denominator of intelligence. This way of thinking has three fundamental flaws: It breaks the “one on one” law. (Okay, it’s not a law, but we live by it at 3.) The irony of mass communication is that a message can’t feel like it was created for a mass of people. You are speaking, in each and every message you create, to a single person. Even though millions of people may see your message, only one person at a time is interacting with the message. There is no collective watching, only many people having individual experiences. If you lose sight of this, every message you create could become meaningless on a personal level. When people are engaged, they are damn smart. You’ve done your homework and know your target. You’ve created a message that not only speaks to your target on an individual level, it will also speak to them based on their knowledge and understanding. This person is going to be engaged because you are solving a problem and/or offering them a benefit that speaks to their current situation. And once you are speaking to someone on their terms, whether they have a doctorate from Harvard or dropped out of eighth grade, you can bet that they are more likely to tune in and be receptive to your message. Nobody likes being talked down to. We’ve all seen the surveys that indicate most people believe themselves to be above average intelligence. Only 49% of them are right. If you want to turn someone off in a hurry, speak down to them and pretend you know more. Watch how quickly they dismiss you (and your product). Respect people in your communications, and they will respect your brand. While it is true that the person you are speaking to is bombarded with advertising and messaging, it is equally true that they will be engaged by intelligent, thoughtful communications. 2009-10-28T16:53:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/the_death_of_a_thousand_demographic_cuts/ As a whole, marketers love determining how people are different. And ad researchers are often pushing to find how people are different. Some clients want us to tell them how their prospective customers are different. And the media outlets work diligently to explain how their audience is different than all the rest. It’s possible to get lost in finding differences and segmenting people to better communicate with them. But beware that you don’t complexify yourself into a meaningless campaign. It happens like this: We have 14 target audiences we need to reach. Men over 35 with a shoe size smaller than 9 tend to like our product because it makes them feel younger, teenagers with more than two siblings purchase our product because it makes them feel older, and millenials taller than 5’ 6” tend to choose us because they like the way it makes them look in the morning, and on and on. So, you put together a great media plan, create semi-custom campaigns for each of your audiences and a year later you sit back and wonder, “How come the men over 35 numbers went down? And teenagers just stopped using our product all together? Well, thankfully, sales held firm for our millenials.” What went wrong? You have a binder that is 5” thick that proves you did your homework. Unfortunately, what you don’t have is a well-defined brand. (A quick refresher: A brand lives in people’s heads, not in your binder. If it is not well-defined, it simply means there is no common positioning and emotional feeling about you among your audience.) Why? Because you tried to give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their diversity. What you need to do is give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their sameness. People do not make purchase decisions based on their demographics. They make decisions on a much more personal level. So, when you get into your planning, sometimes it helps to cut across your demographic segments and figure out, “how are these people the same?” “What values do they share?” “Is there a common factor that is driving a decision to be made?” You might be surprised at how the sameness of your segments may be the key to your campaign’s success. 2009-09-04T17:20:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/great_lemonade_only_comes_from_great_lemons1/ Here’s a thought that’s so obvious, it’s easy to overlook: Before you focus on making your advertising effective, make your product or service effective. Don’t think for a minute that the success of Apple, Nike, Target or any other famous brand is based exclusively on their marketing savvy. They have great lemons. So their lemonade – the advertising and marketing efforts – seems so much sweeter. How many times has a friend who has recently seen a movie told you, “All the good parts were in the trailer.” Inevitably they are referring to an over-hyped movie with a large promotions budget that ultimately fails at the box office. So why does it fail? It has great marketing. Maybe even a big opening weekend. But it fails because the experience leaves the promise unfulfilled. If you want any kind of long-term success, make your “movie” great. Great marketing and advertising works only when the experience or product lives up to the marketing. And the advertising is merely an extension – a caption – of what the ultimate experience will be. That is why you rarely see infomercials, with their ridiculous overpromises, work for more than a short period. Your first and most important priority right now (and “right now” means at any moment, in any economy) is making your product, service or offering so beneficial that your advertising simply needs to capture that in the most efficient way. And then communicate it to the right people. Advertising will provide you no long-term solution without your benefits living up to the promise. Lemons first. Lemonade second. 2009-06-25T23:28:01-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/ideas_first/ In marketing and the advertising agency business, there is an ongoing learning curve to understand and implement new tactics. We constantly work to make sure we can effectively incorporate and implement new media and guerrilla options into our clients' campaigns. In the current environment, most of these popular tactics have to do with utilizing social networking sites and creating meaningful content channels via blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc. Many times, these new tactics are treated as ideas in and of themselves. For the record, these tactics are not ideas. They are just a new channel for ideas. Ideas are the stuff that make campaigns successful, memorable and ultimately, famous. And here’s the truth about great ideas: They’re not easy. Creating meaningful, simple ones is downright hard. There is no formula, software or machine that will give you a great idea. It requires understanding of your objectives, personal knowledge of people, intuition, time, an unrelenting desire to “nail it," and honestly, it takes smart people. Take time. Take care. And you will take your communications to new level with a simple, smart idea. Once you have it, then get to work on how to marry your idea to the target through your tactics. But always remember that your idea is the foundation of your campaign’s success. Discard tactics that don’t allow your idea to flourish and aggressively seek those channels that do. Now, if you ever hear someone say, “I have a great idea, let’s utilize social networks in our campaign," you can reply, “that’s not an idea, it’s a tactic. What’s the idea?” 2009-05-09T00:15:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/selling_simple/ If there is one thing a troubled economy does to marketing, it's to create the desire to try and be all things to all people. The logic goes something like this: A.) Our sales are slowing, B.) Therefore, we need to appeal to a broader target, C.) So, let’s make sure we cover everything in our messaging. But what seems logical is not practical. New marketers tend to believe that you can present the facts (all of them) and get the desired response. However, there is a counter-intuitive truth in successful marketing. This truth is that the easier you make your message — the more understandable and digestible — the more likely someone will make a decision and/or take action. So, when things begin to slow, the logic should go something like this: A.) Our sales are slowing, B.) Therefore, we need to appeal strongly to our target, C.) So, let’s make sure we communicate our benefits simply and clearly. Our job is to make the decision easy, even when people are uneasy about the economy. So, we need to make it simple by taking away all of the noise, all of the issues, all of the uncertainty, and make the decision to choose our product or service an easy one. It’s sometimes tempting to include everything in a message. But ultimately, making the decision complicated during complicated times, just makes the decision easier to avoid. 2009-02-18T00:44:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/when_communicating_means_listening/ Think about the last time you were at a business function (or awkward social gathering of your choosing). Did you enjoy meeting the people who talked incessantly about themselves, or those that wanted to know more about you? The most interesting people are interested people – those who sincerely want to know you and relate to you based on the person you are. In short, they listen to you – really listen – and not just wait for their turn to talk. The same goes for good agency/client relationships, and even brand communications. We’ve found that to have a brand “talk” effectively, we first have to listen - to clients’ concerns, perspectives and the inevitable knowledge they have about their company and industry. At the same time, we have to hear what the target audience wants. How do they understand the brand? How do they interact with the client’s products, and how do their wants and needs fit with the benefits we offer? It’s at this intersection between client and target that the real conversation begins. There is much to learn in consumer anecdotes, the salesforce’s war stories, a clients’ insider-industry perspectives, in-jokes and even discerning the meaning of what’s not said. These are the areas where you truly learn the insights into a client’s business and the particular forces that make all the pieces fit together, from researching a product or offering and bringing it to the market, to discerning insights on how a target audience is responding to an offering. The obvious insights into a client’s brand or services are easy to talk about, and they make for great starting places. But the most powerful brand insights reveal themselves in the quiet spaces. You just have to listen. (It will make you an unbelievable conversationalist.) 2008-09-30T20:58:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/a_shout_out_to_old_media/ There seems to be a lot of focus these days on “new media” – creative ways of reaching consumers that break through ordinary clutter and even gain recognition from our peers. In fact, we often feel compelled to invent new and different tactics in the effort to stay on the edge of what technology offers. But what we sometimes forget in all this forward thinking, is that consumers still use traditional media - quite enthusiastically. And that the most effective advertising always starts with our target audience - not with the idea of our doing something cool for the sake of coolness. There will always be new ground to break. However, with many clients, the best answer often starts simply, with a redesigned website, a great print ad or well-executed radio or TV spot. Our thinking goes like this: Make sure your “old” media is working as well as it can before you race into new territory. Are your print ads compelling? Is your website search-engine optimized and content-rich? Are your broadcast efforts working as well as they can, targeting the right group of people? Are your traditional media campaign efforts (print, outdoor, broadcast, website, direct mail) reinforcing one another with a relevant brand message that appeals to your target audience(s)? Often in the chase for the new, it’s easy to lose sight of making sure your advertising fundamentals are sound. New media opportunities are exciting, but these new channels and technologies will work best for your brand only when the so-called “traditional” aspects of your marketing are working as hard as they can. To your consumer, a brand message is a brand message, whether it’s a billboard, a myspace page, mobile marketing campaign, viral effort or print ad. Old media is still relevant. It just needs a good makeover every now and then. 2008-08-27T17:28:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/why_everything_is_a_media_channel/ These days, campaign elements include nearly every touch point a customer can have with your business. Opportunities for advertising and design have long since ventured beyond the traditional media and new media formats. Customers assume, consciously or subconsciously, that their brand experience with your company will be carried through the advertising or design that piqued their interest all the way to the actual use of your product or service and beyond. As an example, here's a brief list of elements we've created recently that are all brand touch points, but aren't the typical playing fields of ad agencies and design firms: employee uniforms, product designs, greeting cards, apparel designs, self-directed sales kits, product prototype manufacturing, wayfinding, interior design, and lots more. In a world that's getting flatter and smaller every day, it's a valuable reminder to recognize that customers want a seamless relationship with your brand, and truly feel rewarded for choosing your offering when their total brand experience is engaging and consistent. Branding doesn't begin and end with your logo, ads and marketing materials. In fact, it's only the beginning. 2008-07-31T17:04:00-07:00 http://www.whois3.com/blog/detail/measuring_strategy/ Determining the success of a potential ad campaign is an interesting proposition. You can endlessly weigh your media options and test creative executions into an early grave, but rarely does anyone ask, “How do you know if the strategy is right?” Here are guidelines to help you evaluate your thinking. Some short-term indicators: Gut: Make sure the strategy feels right in your gut. Your instinctive reaction to the strategic idea is the first and best way to gauge its strength. You’ve reviewed all the background information, you’ve poured through target research...it’s all there telling your gut what to do. If you’re excited about the strategy, and you can’t wait to get going, you’re probably on to something good. Other people’s reactions: If your agency’s creative and media personnel get excited about a strategic premise, it’s an excellent sign that it will have some impact. Likewise, if our clients are jazzed by the strategy after seeing it even in a Powerpoint format, it’s a great indication. Springboard effect: Is the strategic premise springboarding new and fresh tactics? If the strategy begets new ideas, it’s probably right on. A good sign: The strategy is taking your campaign to new places untried and even unknown to you or your competitors. Energizer effect: Does everyone in the client’s company get excited when they hear about it? Does it make employees and staff feel good about what they do? This is arguably the best measure of “rightness”: you’ve found a compelling way to tell the truth, and people see it and identify with it. And they want to hear more. Of course, once the campaign is up and running, there are more tangible ways to measure the strategy: Obviously, business results: Are sales up? Are objectives being met? Creative awards: While awards really gauge the abilities and talents of the creative staff, it’s not surprising that those campaigns garnering the most creative recognition start with a solid strategic direction, enabling the creative team to do their best work. Impact: Does the campaign break out of its boundaries? Does it get talked about rather than just seen and heard? Do people enjoy it? Longevity of the idea: A great way to know if your strategy was right is by how long it lives before someone asks, “Let’s go back to the drawing board.” Campaigns with sound, insightful strategic directions live longer because they work harder. Strategy is the unseen framework behind great marketing and advertising campaigns. When it works well, you’ll want to protect it. Perhaps that’s the best measurement of all. 2008-06-19T15:21:00-07:00