Marketing Memos

God is a very abstract concept. Religion’s job is selling you on God. Metaphysical marketing, if you will.

The marketing of abstracts and afterlives comes to mind as I slowly consume the pages of Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. Regardless of your faith or lack thereof, we all agree that God is beyond human conception, which makes most religion a null program since its first job is to conceptualize God. Its second job is selling God, which in the realm of selling abstract products has been both the biggest project and one of the most successful. The success of religion comes from thousands of years of refined marketing, segmenting the market into a few million different sects, and following Seth Godin’s advice to agree with what people already think.

Marketing new products into new markets is a bit like preaching to aborigines — they (the buyers/infidels) have no idea what you are talking about, and if you waste too much of their time doing so, they’ll shrink your skull and dine on your leg. To make any abstract or new product desirable, you have to connect it to what the buyer/believer/voter understands in their personal frame of reference. Hence, the earliest of Gods were attached to fire, rain, lightning, fertility and every other aspect of what primitive people called modern life.

Monotheism is merely market consolidation.

Selling the concept of God is not all that removed from selling iPods (and no, I am not a worshiper in the Church of Jobs, though the puns concerning Steve’s divinity and how an Apple fit into original sin are endless). An MP3 player is basically a gizmo, that on outward appearances does nothing. But the joy of music is concrete to everyone that likes the stuff. Thus, advertisements with happy, dancing silhouettes was a way of connecting the abstract (music and these new fangled gadgets) to something very real in the hearts of every music fan, though my Johnny Cash collection oddly doesn’t make me want to undulate down the sidewalk.

When marketing abstracts, you must tie it to something real in the buyer’s mind or heart. The most common means of doing so include:

Using a physical simile: Anything you can see, touch or smell is something real (unless you are off your medications, in which case everything unreal is real). Connecting the abstract product to real and familiar physical things sells. Prudential Insurance perpetually uses big rocks to sell the concept of safety and stability.

Experiences: Any widely common experience is a good option for connecting abstract concepts. No experience, save breathing and bathroom breaks, is universal. But if you segmented your market, odds are some experience has been shared by all buyers, even indirectly. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is understood very well by every CIO.

Emotions: Emotions are internalized experiences, yet the most powerful of the bunch. That is why the Lie of Fear is so popular with politicians and theologians, since it is universal and intense. Connect a product to a positive emotion (iPods and musical bliss) and buyers have an emotional predisposition to the product.

Selling abstracts requires talking and visualizing the real, the familiar. No amount of feature and benefit copywriting will overcome aboriginal indifference. Connect the concept to something definite unless you want to be dinner.

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I’m glad I don’t watch feminine hygiene product commercials these days.

Not that I ever enjoyed them. They just often plopped into television programs that might have had a significant female audience. In the desperation that is mass advertising, marketers know that a great deal of the ad spend is utter waste, such as when pitches for FDS appeared in my bachelor pad. The folks at Preparation-H realize that they sell to a specific demographic, and a growing minority at that. For every anxious prospect reached via a network television show, they are selling to twenty people who are suddenly slightly disgusted. Though you can reduce misspent budget by pouring through demographic viewership data, there is always a great deal of zero return in mass media.

Thankfully mass media may be dying.

Ubiquitous broadband allows for individualized content and advertising targeting. This is nothing new — that was the original commercial glory of the Internet. But the intersection of streaming video and people abandoning television (I dumped all mine last year) is leading headlong into pinpoint ad placement and even customized advertising (which may in turn lead to customized programming). Four-year-old Hulu.com is already raking in a half billion advertising bucks each year, and are pioneering targeted video entertainment. Video ad targeting, in the Hulu sense, offers marketing people many bright alternatives.

Demographics targeting: Hulu knows I am a male, and thus shows me advertising that leans toward a male perspective, pitching products from muscle cars to beer (they missed on that last one since I’m definitely a whiskey man). This saves 50% of ad dollars, but so does the fact that Hulu knows I am mumble-mumble years old, and thus might soon need to see those Preparation-H spots.

Aggregation: Video targeting also leverages aggregation of viewer information. If I watch reruns of Archer, Hulu can see what other Archer watchers prefer in advertising content and make an educated guess as to what ads I might get value from.

Self-selection: Hulu allows people to say if an ad was useful to them. Over time this paints an interesting profile of a viewer, narrowing or expanding what interests them and thus what commercials might sell one viewer some product. Combined with aggregation, this makes initial ad spend very effective and thus very affordable.

Interstitial: The ads one sees at the start, middle or end of a program might change based on the content of the program. You can do that with today’s television, but the ad change might not be best for all audience (advertising Kleenex at the end of a tear-jerker movie might do well for some female viewers, but scoffing males would not add any brand of tissue to their shopping list).

Mobile/desktop/set: The ad that runs can change depending on the environment and location of the viewer. If technology reported that a male viewer was in a suburban area and watching on a plasma TV, ads for pizza delivery would do well. Conversely, if a female viewer was watching on a cell phone at a bus stop during her afternoon commute, ads from Monster.com that suggest a better job awaits would be profitable.

The net (pun intended) take-away is that television is dying, and none too soon. Radio may go the same route. People need asynchronous content, tailored to their preferences, and without meaningless commercials. Marketing managers need to be more frugal with their advertising spend. The two needs are creating an undeniable trend. Now if Hulu would just remove those Budweiser ads from my Family Guy time …

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Social media is an ad hoc referral system gone horribly right.

Referrals are primarily a means to building business, brands and bucks. Ask my dentist (to whom I would gladly refer anybody). He is maniacal about soliciting his patients to make referrals, and he gets them.  He knows that patients move away or die (hopefully from old age and not botched dental surgery), so he is constantly refilling his demand chain for crowns, fillings and laser whitening.

Referrals occur in every business, from your neighborhood dry cleaner to multinational technology companies. The larger the organization, the more it drifts from the quaint and personal sounding “referral” into the more Machiavellian sounding “buzz generation.”  Yet it is essentially the same thing. At either extreme we are asking, coaxing, bribing or begging people to talk to other people about our products, preferably in a positive manner.

Which brings us to social media, which in its purest form is simply user-focused referral facilitating technology.  When someone clicks on a Facebook “like” or a Google “+1″, they are making a referral.  The only difference is that the referral is instantaneous, low effort and broadcast to everyone that person knows instead of just one single acquaintance. But, as with my dentist (he is really good) people need a reason to refer. Motivation. Without it, a referral never happens. The primary reasons people make referrals include:

Obligation: Sometimes people feel obliged to make a referral.  Often services professionals will ask clients to make a referral for them (this often occurs in Linkedin when one makes a request to be referred to a connection’s friend). This is the least effective method because the referral, if made at all, is done under duress or a sense of guilt. The recipient of the referral is rarely interested.

Bribery: My dentist is unashamed to offer a $50 discount on your next outrageously priced dental cleaning if you refer a new patient to him. The motivation is not self-sustaining. Bribes work, but you have to continue the bribing process to continue the behavior. This is why smart parents never bribe their kids because the kids will turn it into an extortion racket.

Self-importance: Most people have egos (I don’t because my ex-wife won mine as part of the divorce settlement). When ego is involved, making a referral is less about glee over the referred product or service, and more about being important in the eyes of the person to whom the referral is made. This is not the worst source of a referral, but it often lacks an authentic connection. People occasionally refer items of little or no consequence to others, and thus do nothing positive to the product’s brand.

Pleasant experience: This is the most common motivation in social media for referrals. Recently a cocktail lounge opened down the street, which pleasantly met with my fiance’s and my satisfaction. I clicked a rating button in Yelp, which seemed like a nice gesture to the new and gracious owners. Much has been written about striving to slightly exceed a customer’s expectations and how this incentivizes them to promote your wares. Social media, because it is a low-impact tool for ad hoc referrals, plays well into this mode of motivation.

Authentic excitement: People go nuts when they are authentically excited about something, which dovetails nicely into brand management theory. Authentic excitement is on the other side of the referral / proselytization line, though that line can be blurry. When jazzed about a product, people not only refer it, they actively promote it, and use social media more as a social-network building mechanism (“I want to connect to you because of our shared passion.”) Some companies establish fan pages on Facebook when consumers of their product are not “fans”, which leads to utterly public and embarrassingly sparse pages.

It should be obvious that the last two motivations are different than the rest because they come spontaneously from consumers for selfless motivations. The other three are exercised only for some personal benefit (assuaging guilt, making a buck and generating influence). This is not to say the first three should be ignored — after all, pumps must be primed. But long-lasting referrals come from people who want to reach out to others in order to spread the happiness they encountered.

Engineering authentic happiness leads to everlasting referrals.

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