Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

photo courtesy of waffrie on flickr creative commons

I live in the Charleston, South Carolina area. A few years ago the old bridges spanning the Cooper River were torn down and a new breathtakingly beautiful bridge was built. The Arthur Ravenel Bridge is a suspension bridge that is a pleasure to drive over because of its architecture and ability to carry a large volume of traffic between Mt. Pleasant and Charleston.

Now as much as I like the bridge, it’s never occurred to me to use it as a component of my corporate identity, logo or in my advertising, but I think I’m in the minority. It seems that 8 out of 10 companies use the Arthur Ravenel Bridge, its towers or other features in their advertising. Now it makes sense for the Cooper River Bridge Run to use it in their advertising, but for a home oxygen supplier?  It makes more sense for the Yarborough Applegate law firm because the letters of their names form an impression of the bridge’s superstructure and it fits for The Bridge 105.5 radio station to use it in their advertising. But I’ve seen the bridge used in real estate ads, restaurant ads and business consultant’s ads. Just get over it!

If you do business in the Charleston area, I suppose you may want to use the bridge to give a sense of place in your logo or advertising, but wouldn’t you rather have imagery that depicts or speaks to how your customers use your products or services?

Your logo is a visual communication between your company and your customers. It should be distinctive. Individual. When customers see your logo, they should comprehend your brand qualities or understand the benefits of doing business with you. It’s lazy to use the most iconic image for your business sector or locale; the Ravenel Bridge in Charleston, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or a scale for a lawyer’s office or a chef’s toque for a restaurant.

When developing your logo and corporate identity, use a brand development process that clarifies your brand promise, qualities, benefits and features. Then your graphic designer can use this material to develop the best corporate identity materials for your company.

When your logo is developed, you’ll be glad yours is as individual as you and your company are.

Research is continuing to show that consumers care more about those they identify as leaders in a segment than about celebrity endorsers.

Click to go to the spot in a new window

Television ad campaigns now running that use the power of celebrity endorsers such as Zaxby’s Chicken ads with Terry Bradshaw and Luke Wilson in AT&T’s ads demonstrate that real influence that causes people to purchase products comes from someone who is influential among the people who use the product.

This insight coincides with research showing that women respond to connectedness and relationships.

How does this translate into your marketing plans?

• Understand who uses your products as well as the other Ws (when, where, why)
• Listen to what users say about your products in forums, social media
• Identify the influencers in the conversation
• Develop genuine relationships with influencers
• Invite them to share their product insight with you
• Take their input seriously
• If appropriate influencers like and use your product, ask them if they will share their preferences among their community (with full disclosure of any and all benefits they may derive from that use.)

This may mean that rather than an up and coming author doing book signings at a bookstore, they meet with well established book groups interacting with members. Whatever the interaction is that derives from listening and developing relationships, it must be natural, unforced and authentic.  No broadcasting. Only natural growth of the audience. It’s not viral, it’s long-term, sustained, organic growth you want.

So many have sought to be the next viral product video, but really, when the end of the day comes, do you really remember the contents of a viral campaign for a product?

I’m not a huge fan of the Olympics and being a Southerner, I don’t often see snow in my locality. So winter sports and the Winter Olympics are a bit foreign to me. For the past five nights, my spouse has watched the TV, thrilled with the speed skaters, riveted by the sliders and misty at the figure skaters. I’ve watched in horror as they have spilled, fallen and run off course. For the life of me, I can’t understand why someone would chance their life by hurling themselves downhill on two strips of thin carbon-Kevlar.

On Tuesday the competitors in the short program men’s figure skating awed me with their power and determination. When the American Jeremy Abbot messed up his program, I felt his emotional pain.

Abbot said,

“I’m going to have to do a lot of digging in the next two days because I’m not going to give up, and I’m not going to leave it here,” he said. “I’m not going to leave my Games on that experience.”

What a lesson for us all! It’s easy to be jubilant in victory. It’s harder to be determined in the face of failure.

If we are in business long enough each of us will fail.  So on reconsideration perhaps I do understand why these Olympic athletes do what they do. In order to win we must risk.  This anonymous poem has held meaning for me for years.  Maybe Abbott knows it too.

The Risks

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool;

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental;

To reach out for another is to risk involvement.

To expose feeling is to risk exposing your true self.

To place your ideas and your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

To live is to risk dying.

To hope is to risk despair.

To try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken,

The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing,has nothing and is nothing;

They may avoid suffering and sorrow,but they cannot learn, feel change, grow, love, live.

Chained by their certitude, they are a slave,they have forfeited freedom;

Only the person who risks is free.

Who has money to burn in 2010?

As a solopreneur or startup in 2010 you must know this: Insightful, well planned and conducted market research is as important as the product you wish to sell. Your tight budget has little room to waste money developing a product that your assumed target won’t purchase. Some assume the cost of research is cost prohibitive; however, actually the opposite is true. Wasting money on an undesired product is cost prohibitive. In real estate or corporate mergers it’s called due diligence and it should be the first step after you have the idea to create a product, extend a line or launch a new business.

Yesterday a colleague and I agreed that we see hesitancy among some businesses to conduct market research. Insights gained as a result of research allow for fine tuning of a successful product and positive message creation. SCORE (Senior Corps of Retired Executives) offers this advice in their Business Plan for a Start Up Business:

No matter how good your product and your service, the venture cannot succeed without effective marketing. And this begins with careful, systematic research. It is very dangerous to assume that you already know about your intended market. You need to do market research to make sure you’re on track. Use the business planning process as your opportunity to uncover data and to question your marketing efforts. Your time will be well spent.”

You should conduct qualitative as well as quantitative research. One on one focus groups conducted by a skilled interviewer yield significant understanding which can be analyzed in light of detailed research conducted by online surveys or pencil and paper surveys.

Businesses that use sound research are far and away more successful than those who make assumptions without data.

If you are writing a blog for your business, you need to stay focused on the goals you set when you decided to begin. Was it to demonstrate your firm’s experience and capabilities or was it to help search engine results by providing keyword rich posts that also demonstrate your businesses’ knowledge?

Hopefully the later is your goal. So here you are, committed or not to the blog and you are short of ideas. These ten ideas will help you write interesting blog posts even when your creative muse has gone on vacation.

1. Look to the news of the day; are there any major news items that impact some aspect of your businesses core competencies? If so, write about how and why. Google News has a robust search feature which allows you to hone in on your most significant keywords.
2. Look to your interactions with your clients. Did you have any “teachable moments” or interactions in the past few days that you feel are common and which, when shared, can provide learning opportunities? If yes, write about those moments; be sure to keep the names of those you mention and identifying comments discrete. You don’t want to embarrass your clients or yourself.
3. Write about some of the “basics” of your business. It is always good to refresh yourself on core competencies and share fresh insights as to why these basics are so important.
4. Write about management issues affecting your business. Each business has issues that are common to them all and often generalize to others in the industry.
5. Look to trends in your industry and analyze how one of them may affect clients in your industry.
6. If your blog is client facing, write about new developments that are sure to produce results for them. Tell why.
7. Invite another industry / sector expert to be a guest blogger. They can write about their insights into key issues in your industry.
8. Share a client success story (with permission of course.) Tell why they succeeded and if you were a part of that success, help readers see how and why the client succeeded.
9. Share a major learning experience; an Ah-ha moment. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be bullet proof…just healed. So say how and why you got insight that helped you redirect.
10. Share information about your colleagues or employees or even new staff member news, awards and competencies. I would even suggest having one of your employees write a guest post. Invite them to share some of their personality and talents they bring to working with you.

Have you ever noticed that as you listen to the radio during your morning commute that Brooke Ryan might refer to a news item and later when you are out to lunch you see the same story headline in the newspaper that was lying on your table? This phenomenon of local news being driven by the research and reporting of local newspapers is documented in a report from Pew Research.

…But a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, …suggests that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media—particularly newspapers.

The study, which examined all the outlets that produced local news in Baltimore, Md., for one week, surveyed their output and then did a closer examination of six major narratives during the week, finds that much of the “news” people receive contains no original reporting. Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information. more

Last year as ad revenue declined, we saw our area newspapers shift to more local content. The shift was happening all across the country.

The research from the Pew Foundation tells us that we are right to have some concern about the changes.

Pew notes, “The local papers, however, are also offering less than they once did.” That is because there is less ad revenue. Newspapers can only print what they can pay for. As one area editor shared with me his publisher said, “That’s a great story idea, but if we don’t have ad revenue to support an additional page, we can’t print it.” However, in the meantime, random column inches here and there contain uninteresting blurbs like the one in today’s Post and Courier, “Shed damaged by fire, no one injured.” That’s a news story?

The Pew study also confirms that the web is the first place of publication and an alert system. In addition there is another interesting tidbit in the study that we PR people have known, media releases are often the source of much of the information contained in the newspaper.

The takeaway from this is:

• Newspaper journalism is important as the foundational source for most local news
• Original stories have declined
• Well crafted media releases may be used to place news because there are fewer journalists with less time and column inches to give to originally sourced stories.

So, it is the job of public relations professionals to craft news worthy well written items for our media colleagues use and consumption. There is an even greater chance that your firm’s news will end up right where you want it to be.

One of the trends that we see for marketing communications in the coming year is the expectation that businesses must regain trust.

“In the past year, 91% of 25-to-64-year-olds around the world indicated they bought a product or service from a company they trusted, and 77% refused to buy a product or service from a distrusted company.”

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust has been lost around the globe and no where has it been lost as much as in the United States. The Edelman Barometer further demonstrates that increasing government regulation of businesses is favored by publics were trust in businesses has eroded.

The Edleman Trust Barometer findings show trust down around the globe.

How will corporations and businesses rebuild trust?

Many will do so through activities designed to demonstrate corporate environmental and social responsibility.

Edelman states in their executive summary,

among those who trust business to do what’s right, companies that are seen as responsible are significantly more likely to be supported in their efforts to sell their goods and services, pursue changes in local laws, seek preferential treatment, or have foreign investors assume a controlling stake in the business.”

The Subaru Share the Love event is an example of a way to demonstrate a corporations’ caring. Subaru is making a donation of $250 to a non-profit (whom Edelman says are more trusted than any other type of organization) for each vehicle they sell between now and January 4, 2010. According to Edelman, in 2009, banking and automotive companies lost more trust than any other industry sectors. Clearly, Subaru is hoping to gain trust through this promotion.

Subaru which has strong allegiance among millenials is hoping for transference of trust to their products by making these donations. However, this type of activity only works if it is genuine. Any hint of falseness and gains in trust will be lost. Transparency is the foundation of trust.

Great amounts of research have been done to understand what works and doesn’t. An article on ThomasNet.com “Promoting Corporate Social Responsibility,” By David R. Butcher does an excellent job of laying out the research and the article’s summation draws it all together:

With companies facing increasing pressure from investors, governments, prospective employees and consumers to make their operations, products and services more socially responsible, it’s no surprise that Grant Thornton asserts that corporate social responsibility is “now a necessity rather than a choice.”

Businesses who fail to understand these important shifts in the public’s mind will not grow and loose share.

Over this last year, we’ve seen the explosion of social media onto the “big screen” of businesses. Many have scrambled to create Facebook pages and put their customer service online while hearing constantly of the death of print media. Lots of businesses have pulled their traditional advertising to the point where many print media have folded, shrunk or downsized. We seen the complete acceptance of wireless / mobile devices and understand that there is no message downtime.

As the dust settles on this year we see the frantic scramble to get into social media normalizing. More businesses understand the new conversation channels or are at least trying to incorporate them in their mix. We understand that television and print media while changing will not go away. We understand that there is a conversation and that the customer truly owns the brand.

What do you see in your crystal ball for 2010?

We recognize that the U.S. is composed of a diverse population, with 38% of us being over 44 years of age; 37.4% of us being 18-44 years of age and the remainder under 17 years of age.

As marketing and business communications professionals, this means we comprehend each audience segment has preferred information channels. As we promote our services and products, we understand that a 21 year old will get their news from Google reader and that at 58 year old from most probably from either TV or print media. That there are some of us who, while in the older segments, use new technology, embracing mobile media as much as the younger generations. We also understand that not only younger generations care about social responsibility; that social responsibility is a required part of being in business. That when it comes to media relations, the media are just as stressed as other business segments and are trying to do as much with fewer resources. That our job is to work in tandem with them by supplying truly interesting information and sources to help them do their jobs.

2010 promises to be rich with opportunity for small businesses to act like big corporations when it comes to reaching customers through all the channels with a straight to consumer approach that is more about what the customer wants in their lives.

In summary:

• Marketing Communications
  • More segmentation of message—We’ll use Twitter, Facebook, the local newspaper as well as television, and increasingly, mobile technology.
  • Social media acceptance as one of the major message delivery vehicles
  • Social responsibility as a requirement of doing business
  • Blurring of the difference between advertising and public relations
• For PR
  • Video pitching
  • Social media acceptance as one of the major message delivery vehicles to media contacts and the consumer
  • Increasing message delivery direct to the consumer
  • We’ll turn more to multi media releases, using the power of video sharing, and pod casts to enrich press releases
  • Public relations professionals as major advisors for not only publicity but for advertising and marketing messages.

Share your prognostications with us. We look forward to learning from everyone how they see the new year shaping up for them.

Today I came across this article on how and why changing content on a website can help benefit you in search engine positioning. The chart above is from the article and demonstrates how dramatic a result one can have with fresh content.

With the announcement of Gourmet’s death, this week and House and Garden a few years ago, we realize that specialty consumer directed media publications are not immune from the shift to digital.