Category Archives: Promotions

Promoting technology – what works and what does not

Simple Statements

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Dr. John, the King of New Orleans, sings a song that advises other musicians to “Keep That Music Simple.” The same concept applies to market messages. Rushing to tell every audience everything about your product leads to muddled messages. Your headline and opening blurbs have a 15 second shelf life before a reader’s attention wanders. Instantly connecting their motivations to your value proposition requires keeping the message simple. Oracle has a long history of being blunt in their marketing. Their magazine ads were once the most direct in the business, targeting techies and laying out Oracle’s performance superiority. Prospects instantly understood the value offered by Oracle and thus acquired a bias for the product. Instant believability based on instant cognition. For contrast sake, let us look at IBM’s top-line message for their DB2 database. It reads “DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is optimized to deliver industry-leading performance across multiple … Continue reading →

Intangible Targeting

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The only thing worse than television shows about food are newspaper reviews about music. Food and tunes are pleasant assaults on our senses, using hearing, smell and taste buds to entice us. Rob a customer of those essential inputs, and the experience is no longer complete. Yes, Food Network pot roasts on your 52″ screen look yummy, but the lack of aroma fails to launch you from your Lazy Boy and to the supermarket in search of dead cow. Likewise a printed review of the new CD from an alleged rising star does little to illuminate if you want him croaking from your dashboard during drive time. Intangibles are the toughest thing to sell (as my mumble-mumble-mumble years in consulting have taught me). Selling things that lack substance — physical, worldly shapes and colors — requires associating the product with what people already know and have experienced. When Steve Jobs … Continue reading →

Valuable Motives

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“Buy our features,” said the German software company representative. “You vill like our features.” The way he said it sounded vaguely threatening. More to the point is that nobody buys features, his or yours. Not in B2C markets and not in B2B ones either. Advertising features, and to a large degree benefits, misses the mark in marketing communications. The reason is that features and benefits do not describe what drives a buyer’s intent. What motivates buyers, both logically and emotionally does. Hunger provides motivation. So do natural sexual impulses (which often leads to children, which then launches a thousand new motivations, including the desire to find very dark and quiet places in which to hide). A person’s motivations force them into seeking ways to achieve something (their expected outcome) or make them instantly aware of a possible solution when it is thrust under their noses. That last one only applies … Continue reading →

Hulu Dancing

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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 … Continue reading →

B2B Buzzing

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.” Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word. B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process. Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics … Continue reading →

Social Service

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Facebook is your friend.  So is Google, just not a close friend that you share things with (aside from your GPS location if using an Android phone). Recently we performed a pro-bono experiment in association with a book launch.  Even though the author had a platform and a publicist who wrangled radio talking time, we deployed a little advertising using both Google and Facebook.  The results show why social media makes a difference, and how to move from static to dynamic in social environments. Over an 18 day period we pushed Google and Facebook ads which had the same creative layouts.  Viable keywords were selected with Google as were “interest” categories on Facebook.  For Google, the test was divided between taking clickers to a landing page on the author’s blog site or directly to Amazon.com after a few reader reviews had accumulated.  In Facebook all clickers were taken to a … Continue reading →

Unextreme Exploring

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We can name many famous explorers, but can you name those that never returned from their expeditions? The unknown is the danger within every new territory. Venture into an unblazed forest and you may never find your way home.  The same goes for new markets, or even markets that are rapidly changing (the sense of panic is palpable in the book publishing market these days).  Yet marketing in virgin territories is not unlike exploring a new continent.  In each, testing is essential. When the pilgrims landed in what later became the United States, they did not make a mad Lewis and Clark dash across the continent.  They rarely ventured away from the shore and whatever rivers provided fresh water. In small steps, they set off in one direction for a short distance, blazed their trail and returned the way they came.  The next morning they would try a different direction.  … Continue reading →