Category Archives: Communications

Promotional Propaganda

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Perception is reality, until reality overrides perception. Marketers are branded as liars in no small part because many of them are. So pervasive is the trait that certain smart people have made good money writing on the subject. Marketers are charged with promoting products, which entails setting public perception about the product. In modern use of the word, this often devolves into propaganda instead of persuasion. Effective in the short term, setting unrealistic public perception about a product will eventually backfire. This happens to politicians all the time. Since perception is reality, at least in the short term, you need to have a clear notion of the reality you create for the market. Like the elastic in a fat fellow’s waistband, it can only be stretched so far before it fails. Since product disappointment is the essence of negative buzz, the greater the degree of potential disappointment you create, the … Continue reading →

Content Continence

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Content is king unless it is crud. There is no grand magic to content marketing. Yet many promotion probationers manage to muck it up. Long ago Google established that relevance was what people wanted in search, which really means they want relevant content. Producing relevant content and putting it where your target market can “discover” it makes content marketing works. Producing irrelevant content and forcing people to trip over it will cause you (and your company) to fail. Many content marketers work on the volume of content, assuming that a large number of keyword rich pages will cause customers to connect. Such “strategy” once produced high traffic but low conversions. With Google constantly refining relevance filtering, voluminous content it isn’t even producing much traffic these days. Yet when it does, the outcome isn’t conversions, but annoyed ex-prospects who feel their time was wasted chasing the promise of meaningful information and … Continue reading →

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 →

Not-so-great Expectations

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A rather Glassy lady said “I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.” She should have been in marketing. Marketers and brand managers are in the expectation business. Part of their job entails defining and setting the expectations of their customers or their market. Since expectations are the state of anticipating something, we marketing mavens create the customer’s state anticipation. When reality doesn’t match what is anticipated, odd and dangerous things occur. If you don’t understand this, just think back to your first blind date. When defining the expectations you want customers to have, you can aim too low, too high, just right or aim for something entirely different. Only the last two work and the latter is the trickiest, though often most profitable. Generally speaking, setting customer expectations a little low is a good strategy. Pleasantly surprised people become repeat customers. If their expectations are consistently exceeded, even by … 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 →

Play Real Good

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The violin’s heavy vibrato found my ear through the chaos of the subway. Being a music junkie, the stuff tends to get my attention. Hearing a well-played violin in a crowded underground tunnel filled with thousands of rush-hour commuters was a miracle. That it held me for a brief moment was regrettably common. We learned in Communications 101 that there are three factors in passing along info – the transmitter, the receiver and the noise in between. Transmitters, be they buskers or marketers, have to confront noise in order for their product to even be perceived. Like the subway scene in which an aspiring violinist struggled to be heard, marketers have only the tiniest moments of relative quiet to connect. But noise is growing. The ability of people to tune out is positively Darwinian. With promotional messages now coming via radio, TV, billboards, browsers, embedded in apps and on nearly … Continue reading →