Category Archives: Communications

Distilled Desires

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“Our software is the greatest thing ever. It is disruptive and something that will make your employees happy!” That is not an exact quote, but darn close to the opening paragraph of every landing page created by newly minted marketers at Silicon Valley startups. Like most web fodder from such shops, it communicates nothing. In our infobesity age, humans have learned to scan at a nearly subconscious level. Gone are the days when a one-pager would actually be read by a prospect. People glean information based on gut-level reaction to keywords, images, colors and social indicators. In short, they read headlines. Hence, if your headline does not grab the reader’s attention in the first five seconds, the odds of them investigating further approaches zero. That headline value propositions are hugely important is not new, nor are the steps to creating them. But the urgency has multiplied. Ignoring the process for … Continue reading →

Belief Branding

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Belief is branding. The question is what forms belief. I am in the earliest of stages in creating a TED Talk, pondering the realities of what people believe and how they come to believe such. On the lower end of the ways we organize what we hold to be true are the elements of belief, knowledge and facts. Individually, humans know few facts compared to humanity’s abundance of cumulative investigation and testing. Thus most of what we shaved apes use to guide our daily activities are either knowledge (acquaintance/familiarity with facts, truths, or principles) or belief (opinion or conviction). Living life this way is perfectly reasonable since omniscience is a rare commodity in this world (despite what politicians say about themselves). The more one has belief, the less one need depend on facts. Every snake oil salesman elected or otherwise, creates a sense of belief. Medicine show pitchmen made rural … Continue reading →

Nothing’s Dead

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“Trade shows are dead. Magazines are dead. Direct mail is dead.” Sometimes I think young marketers are dead, but only from the neck up. When I coach startups, I often hear their leaders and even their marketing staff push back on old school promotional channels. One outfit, with series-A funding even, was dead set on using only social media … to sell to a broad set of non-tech CxOs for a high dollar technology offering. When I mentioned these targeted CxOs might be more easily targeted and reached via direct mail the startup’s CEO came close to stroking-out on me … and he was only 30 years old. Trade shows aren’t dead, though they are still expensive. Magazines aren’t dead, though many are shifting to digital. Direct mail isn’t dead as my mailbox attests daily. The fact is all modes of reaching a prospect are valid. The choice falls to … Continue reading →

Maddening Messages

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Want to drive your competitors insane (assuming they are not already)? A recent thread exploded on a CMO web site asking the basic question “What do you do that drives your competitors crazy?” Most of the answers were pap, lazily resting on vague superlatives such as “listen to our customers” and “being honest”. I chimed in (of course) with my favorite “poisoning the well”, which does not imply spiking competitor water coolers with toxic substances. Marketers tend to focus on one key customer stakeholder persona. They put 80% or more of their effort into recruiting the job title they believe will cause a company to buy their product. This is not a bad strategy, but when you have two or more competitors grooming the same stakeholder, getting their attention becomes increasingly impossible. If you are coming from behind, it may be useless. The counter strategy (and a good primary strategy … Continue reading →

Cultural Connections

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“Donate tonight,” said the actress at a local community theater, using a shrill and fake British accent to warm-up the audience for the evening’s production of Spamalot. “After all, it is the arts. Our culture. Just the very basis of civilization as we know it!” As uncultured as advertising often is, it connects to culture or it fails (and if uncultured advertising works, then the culture needs an upgrade). The antiseptic dictionary definition of culture is “the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.” It is the sum of the social fabric in which individuals wrap themselves, typically from indoctrination or attraction (the latter explaining why red-headed proto-yuppies sing gangsta rap tunes). Culture includes things that are familiar, and thus comfortable. Advertising that attaches to specific cultural beliefs is more rapidly accepted. It is little wonder that billboards for American political candidates are almost always … Continue reading →

Brand Reversal

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“Bacon is health food” will never fly, but “pork, the other white meat” did pretty well. Brands are assigned by the market unless you force the market to think and feel what you want them to. Before 1987, it was common wisdom that eating pigs was bad for the body, and not just from uneducated cooks serving up sides of trichinosis. Bacon was evil and even pork chops were off everybody’s diet, regardless of a lack of religious law. This was bad for pig farmers as an increasingly health-conscious America was jogging with Jim Fix and rediscovering vegetables. Even ranchers were winning as they promoted leaner cuts of meat and mom discovered how to trim the fat we used to grill and swallow. Swine sellers fought back by launching the “Pork, the other white meat” marketing campaign to change the pig’s brand image. Pork prices rose, sales jumped 20%, and … Continue reading →

Copy Wronging

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Marketing copywriters are like novelists: they don’t like critics. During a recent client copywriting process, I tighten reins on a copywriter who had soared off the cliffs of bombastic prose, painting the client as a little too good to be true. This otherwise bright and competent copywriter, evidently distracted thinking about his unfinished novel, had peppered his newly wrought copy with words that created a sense of disbelief. Such words are easy to spot … just look at the “about us” page of any funded start-up. When you see “market leading”, “disruptive” and “compelling”, then they likely are none of the above and you immediately sense it. Words can trigger emotions, and good copywriters – armed with a competent branding guide – will select the right words to evoke the right emotion. Word churners (a polite word for “hack”) often pick easy and dramatic sounding words in an attempt to … Continue reading →