Category Archives: Advertising

Media Mutters

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Media ain’t what it used to be … thank God. The internet has made everyone a publisher, and as such has completely rearranged from where information and power emit. Dead is the quaint era when all info rained like fetid manna from centralized sources. Today you, the marketing ground workers, have seemingly endless avenues for promoting your products, your brand and your profits. Which is why some of you have been driven to drink (though for a few it was just a short stroll). The reason self-medication is becoming popular in marketing circles has nothing to do with Mad Men or three martini lunches. It derives from needing to orchestrate outreach through all these media channels. Wherever such seeming chaos ensures, it is best to take a deep breath, a shot of something, and distill your options into a manageable set. In media, there are three basic categories through which … Continue reading →

Stupidly Simple

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Simple declarative statements communicate most effectively. Kinda like the one above. Marketing messages need to be simple, yet marketing “pros” routinely make them complicated. Nowhere is the situation worse than in tech marketing. Perhaps lingering “feeds and speeds” mindsets pervert messaging. Or worse yet, maybe marketing types are budding authors who use marcom materials to practice their literary skills (there is a novel in every marketing director, which is a damn good place to keep it). Weak marketers rely on buzz words when copywriting skills and product differentiation do not exist. Even I suffer from an alienating allegiance to alliteration. Complexity sucks, and sucks the life out of messaging. People don’t have time to think, and forcing them into unsupervised thinking is dangerous. Keeping messages simple, even sparse, leads buyers rapidly to cognition, self-qualification and motivated interest. Slowing them down with needless and distracting verbiage does the opposite. Yet tech … Continue reading →

Tripping Customers

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My father was too fond of the old joke about a farmer and his mule. The punch line of the joke was that the farmer would whack the mule in its forehead with a two-by-four, saying “First you have to get his attention.” Customers are like that, though I don’t advocate felonious assault as a promotional tactic. Modern life is complicated to the point that we can only be distracted. Thus, distraction is the first act of promotion. If you cannot pry your prospects’ attention away from their work, smartphones, Facebook and on-demand videos, then you cannot possibly move them toward buying. Long gone are the sad old days of advertising when spokesmodels pointing to refrigerators with a disembodied droning voice pitching platitudes about the appliance. Customers are mules and have to be coaxed with similar bluntness. This is not new, though the chain of advertising practice is oddly convoluted … Continue reading →

Messaging Messes

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“Blah blah bla blah blah blah!” That pretty much reflects most B2B marketing messages. Precision is lacking, from headlines all the way down to often absent calls-to-action. The penalties for imprecise market messaging include high landing page bounce rates, no actions taken by prospects and leaking sales funnels. The pay-offs from precise market messaging include short sales cycles, brand biasing and rapid word-of-mouth market awareness. So why does your web site say blah? Why is your collateral blah? The goal of messaging is to move a prospect down the path of discovery, terminating in a sale. At each step in this path of discovery, they need to learn about your product in a way that makes sense in that specific moment of discovery, and to be led toward the next phase of discovery. All this requires knowing the phases of discovery then composing very succinct messages such that they achieve … Continue reading →

Social Shortcomings

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Social marketing isn’t it. With humans living on the net, and with obvious advantages to social media manipulations as a marketing tactic, many people have happily abandoned other forms of promotions in favor of social. Later they unhappily abandon their jobs to fill slots in unemployment lines. Humans, being the quirky bunch they are, need a number of things to occur before a purchase. Most of all they need to perceive value in a product and believe the value will actually be delivered. Good marketers can create a brand (the basic value proposition) and awareness of the brand, then discover this is not enough. Alone, knowing a brand and that it makes a promise is weak soup that omits essential ingredients in the marketer’s cookbook. No wonder social marketing often tastes bland. To believe in a brand requires some form of “proof.” This may be fanciful or it may be … Continue reading →

Old School Social

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My dentist does social marketing. This should surprise nobody because social marketing has existed since the first two cavemen competed by selling left-over mastodon meat (“My mastodon steaks come with 30% fewer fatal microbes!”). Businesses have always used the power of social networking, long before social media became a reality. Social media changes nothing and thinking about primitive social marketing helps to clarify your social outreach. Social marketing is, in essence, assuring that people talk about you in positive terms. As an example, when you move to a new city, odds are you ask everyone about their recommendation for a good dentist. Some will warn you about bad jaw crackers, and others will wax poetic about how gentle and through is their dental doc. This is social promotions in its most basic form. The product (dental services) is referenced by customers based on the positioning criteria they most vale (money, … Continue reading →

Fiat Folly

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My dictionary defines fiat as “an arbitrary decree,” which makes redundant a recent Fiat motorcar advertising campaign. A stylish bimbette and a bubble car landed in my lap this morning, all combined in a ten panel fold-out mailer from Fiat that pimped their 500 series micro machine, which looks like the bastard child of a Mini Cooper and a Volkswagen Beetle. Therein Fiat attempts to differentiate this vehicle by linking various models of their rolling soap bubble with various luxury brand names (Note to Fiat: It isn’t a luxury vehicle if you drive with your knees in your chin). The Gucci edition was shown with the slinky blonde draped across the hood, her impossibly long legs escaping from abbreviated shorts and her top strategically unzipped. Ironically the photo caption read “European model shown” which could have applied to the vehicle or the vamp. I have no idea from what rented … Continue reading →