Category: a slice of STRATEGY

Ok, seriously, one of the best pieces of email marketing I’ve received in a LONG time, from…..well, an email marketing company. Emma always useswitty copy and a fun attitude in their brand, but this email campaign is genius – appealing to playfulness, business needs, AND your quest to help the environment. It all ties together quite nicely. I think I may have found a new email marketing company for Red Slice!

Did you catch the brouhaha last week over the LA Times ad for NBC’s new cop drama “Southland”? Seems it was listed on Page One of the paper, separated by a border, in a different font and marked as an advertisement – but it still looked and read a bit like editorial (it mentioned “this reporter” following police on a night that ends in a shooting.) At the end of the article, they listed the air date and time for the new show.

They say this stretched the boundaries and also innovated with a new type of advertising, a la product placement. I have to admit to being a little torn about this one.

The marketer in me loves that they found a new, innovative way to market the series that is true to the brand and what it is about – real, gritty, violent, newsworthy. And the fact that everyone is talking about it means NBC got even more PR mileage out of it. But the citizen in me is a bit outraged that we are now resorting to masquerading advertising as editorial – as if we don’t have enough of so called “journalists” in our society serving merely as political mouthpieces and promoters (Fox News, anyone?) Feels a little lazy – can’t we innovate in ways that don’t taint real news? I feel like we gotta draw the line somewhere.

What do you think? Innovative and appropriate marketing or lazy and irresponsible markting?

Great post by my buddy Karin Koonings, which links back to a resourceful checklist by Jay Heyman on determining if a promotion is in line with your brand strategy or not. Seems KFC is offering to refill potholes in exchange for chalk advertisements in the road or something. What?! Forget about all the bad “chicken getting hit crossing the road” jokes or roadkill analogies. She references a quick Q&A to size up if the promotion is worth the cost and effort or not. Very useful.

All this hullabaloo about U.S. bailout recipients continuing to honor their sports marketing sponsorship contracts, got me thinking about the common misperception of marketing in our world. Albeit a pretty balanced post about the issue here at Huffington Post, I can’t help but add to the discussion.

People are steamed because of lavish parties, perks and executive pay run amock at companies receiving bailout (read: taxpyaer) funds. And I get that, I really do. I am not saying irresponsible spending should go unchecked or unregulated. But this “villagers charging with torches and dogs” has gotten out of hand. Let’s talk about the basics of marketing spending and revenue generated.

1) Closing Deals
While all these fancy sports sponsorships, golf rounds, and executive excursions can be seen as wasteful, it’s really just relationship marketing. Look past the glitz and glamour for a second and remember that. Financial services deals and the like are much more “relationship” sales than anything else – they are not selling chewing gum that people will just buy on impulse. If the American people really want to get these loans repaid, they have to let companies spend money on smart marketing so they can attract new clients and generate more revenue. And we should let experienced marketers be the judge of the best marketing to benefit their own companies.

Why and when did marketing get this reputation for equaling wasteful spending? I have fought this for years at many companies, where they fail to understand that marketing and branding – even if there is not a direct one to one correlation with a sale – is important for staying top of mind in customer’s eyes, maintaining customer loyalty and solidifying the brand perception. You have to look at the aggregate effect in many cases. No company I know of has ever increased sales while decreasing their marketing budgets (not long term anyway) Yes, you might be jealous and feel outraged, but this is the way business is generated in many sectors – if it wasn’t a successful tactic, companies wouldn’t be spending money to do it. You would be surprised at how many deals get closed due to such relationship marketing. While it can be fun and guests are indeed pampered, it’s about the bottom line. And any of us who’ve had to give up family and personal time to travel and entertain clients knows it’s not all fun and games – it’s still work.

I learned this over many years of doing “hospitality events” for software clients. At first, I too thought this was just a boondoggle for salespeople and I reluctantly booked baseball and football suites with my budget. But I soon saw first-hand the value that comes from customers getting to know salespeople on a casual level, from relationship building outside the office, and from giving a little to get a lot. Many a deal was closed due to this kind of personal, one on one attention. It was worth far more in sales at the end of the day than what we spent on the events.

2)Keeping other infustries afloat
This kind of marketing spend has a domino effect – our money was keeping hundreds of hotel, taxi, waitstaff and ballpark employees employed and productive. Demanding all these trips and events get cancelled only ensures minimum wage workers will suffer in the end as well – have you seen what the pull out of conferences in Las Vegas and Florida have done to the hotel and hospitality industry?

3) Honoring contracts
It is not as easy as people think to just “pull out” of these big ticket committments. Putting aside issue#2 above, there is indeed a legal component to all of this. Last time I checked, we hadn’t changed the law to void all contracts just because people don’t like them anymore. Often, the company ends up having to pay a hefty price anyway to break such a contract – and then they are not able to reap the benefits of closing more deals and getting more exposure. So which is really a more wasteful use of money in the end – spending for nothing, or spending for something?

If we want companies to be healthy again, they have to close deals. To close deals of this sort, you need personal relationships and trust that are not built up across a conference room table. People may say they buy based only on quality of product or service but time and time again, this has been proven wrong. Relationships matter. Trust matters. Yes, people have gotten layed off at these companies and you might think those funds could be put to better use saving jobs. I feel for those layed off, I really, really do. But there will be no jobs left to save at the end FOR ANYONE if new business is not generated and the company keeps floundering. What’s the greater good? Let’s all have a better understanding of the function of marketing and branding in the sales cycle. Let’s let these companies market in the way that will bring in the most business – and pay back the taxpayer coffers as quickly as possible. Oversight is fine to ensure responsible spending….blind anger is just counterproductive.

What do you think?

Seems WPP and Google are teaming up to finally research in-depth how effective online ads are. More specifically, “how online media influences consumer behaviour, attitudes and decision making.” They will be looking at both buying actions as well as psychological impact of all different types of online ads. Some heavy hitters are involved here, including researchers from Harvard and M.I.T.

While online ads are great for tracking immediate responses, number of eyeballs and the like, we still have a lot to learn about how they influence behavior, whether they impact brand perception and how they integrate with offline media. I have always included SEO (and often paid search) in my mix for traffic driving when I worked in corporate, but it was easier to see how it impacted traffic in the aggregate, rather than one to one buying (with complex enterprise software, that is to be expected – no one is going to see a search ad and plop down $500K for software without more touchpoints).

Optimizing your website for “organic search” (when someone types in the search term and you appear in the listsings they get back) is pretty easy if you have good web designers like Karo or Foxparlor. But search rankings rely on 3 things: 1) meta tags within the code of your site 2) your content and how it is written (how often do terms appear in your copy?) and 3) how frequently your site content gets updated to remain relevant (blogs help with this). This is why maintenance and periodic tracking of your search rankings is so important – you can’t just deal with it once and expect your ranking to remain up there forever. Constant viigilance is needed.

Not sure if search advertising is going to be part of this research study, but my guess is yes since Google is sponsoring it.

Eddie Bauer is getting back to its roots – essentially the initial brand strategy. They are a great example of what happens when you expand and do not stick with your core reason for being. Not that expansion is bad – you just need to ensure it remains consistent with your brand.

According to the WSJ, the company spent the last decade or so branching out into women’s casual wear. But the company began as an outdoor wear company and is introducing its first line of “high performance mountaineering wear and gear” in more than a decade – and selling it in a “store within a store” setting. They will now be competing directly once again with the likes of North Face and Columbia. Their CEO, Neil Fiske came from Limited Brands and said he followed the Eddie Bauer brand for over 15 years before joining in 2007. He says, “I had been watching the brand….and I was always thinking, ‘Someone is going to get a hold of that brand and bring it back to its roots, and it’s going to be a great comeback story.” And now he is the one steering the ship in that direction.

The company has put together an impressive team of product advisors and spokespeople – famous mountaineers who have climbed Everest, Mt. Rainier and even one who is the first American to have climbed all the of world’s 8,000 meter peaks. They provide input and strategic direction on the products – they even tested fabrics on Rainier, Aconcagua in Argentina, and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. The company wanted to keep the product simple and eliminate any extra uneccesary features that might add wright.

One really interesting note: Fiske hired a “brand historian” to put together an archive of the company’s past – and this was used in product design nd marketing. This acknowledgment of brand is a testament to how important it can drive all sorts of business decisions. I guess when you want to get back to your roots, you have to know what they look like.

When it comes right down to it, we are in business to make money. But unless you know the true essence, the core of what your business is all about, you will be commoditized to the lowest price or the easiest solution. And in a market where many new businesses fail, that is a death sentence.

Having a clear brand strategy enables you to do everything else in your business so much more easily. It guides you down what products to offer, how to price them, what your logo should convey, what experience your website should evoke, even what colors you should use. Making such decisions without a strong brand foundation is akin to throwing darts at a moving target – and at that point, you will waste a lot of time and money with designers, website programmers, manufacturers, etc. because either everything will look good or nothing will. Without a guidepost, any road looks like the right one, even if it leads to a dead end!

Steelers or Cardinals? I actually don’t care about either team, so I’m just not sure. But the Super Bowl will be good as always for one thing: the ads.

But according to today’s WSJ, Super Bowl ads are ditching kitchy for hard-sell, immediate action.

In a sign of the times, many of the Super Bowl ads this year – which are going for a whopping $3 million for a 30 second spot (and that doesn’t include all the production costs of making the dang commercial in the first place) – are going for a more value-driven approach and focusing on getting people to act: either with packaged offerings, like Teleflora’s $29.99 Valentine’s bouquet, or by promoting website visits (cash4gold.com),

Also, we should expect less “funny” and more emotional or nostalgic ads, that play off of the gloomy times we are in.

With this current economic climate, advertisers will need to promote value and hard-selling while balamcing the need to maintain their brand image to one of the largest audiences for a single event. I just think we’re going to see less “brand image” ads this year.

In an unrelated article earlier this week, there was talk of more digital interactivity with Super Bowl ads – promoting special websites, integrating texting or cell phone ads, or leading people to go online to a certain page or take certain actions. The idea being to leverage the 30 seconds into other activity. It will be interesting to see what ideas the advertisers come up with in that regard.

Takea look at this amusing (yet eerily accurate) video on what happens when clients try to get their marketing to do TOO much at one time.

Having worked at an agency, I can totally relate to this with real-world examples. But also having worked on the client side, I can understand the pressure faced by competing agendas. If I had a nickel for how many times I had to fit partner logos onto something…..

Time for a little common sense to be injected into our marketing efforts, don’t you think?