Archive for the ‘Brand Management | Brandtailing’ Category
The problem with being cheap is that once you start, your competitor will likely play the same game. 90-days later you’ll find yourself as a profitless commodity.
Cheap is a lazy way out of the battle for consumer awareness.
Why do some customers focus so much on price? Because you’re not giving them anything else to think about.
With 84% of U.S. consumers using the internet to determine what they’re going to buy and who they’re going to buy from, having a brand is more important than ever.
Isn’t it true that in every market measured, the leading brand, the one with the highest positive name recognition, has a huge advantage over the others? Whether it’s Honda, Nike or Tide Laundry Detergent, a lot of benefits go to the brand that wins.
Branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, it is about getting consumers to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem. The great success stories are not the companies that did what others did, but a little cheaper. They are companies that decided to do things a whole lot differently. Don’t just think better. Think different and establish your brand.
Written By: Kristen Roberts
Whoever says email is dead doesn’t pay attention to statistics. (And thank you Chris Penn and DJ Waldow over at Blue Sky Factory for continuing to share those great statistics with us) Email is absolutely, positively not dead. Spam mail, however, is ten feet under. May those messages rest in the four-letter-place where they came from.
Today’s good email campaigns are proving to be one of the most cost-effective forms of modern day marketing. By good we mean a clean mailing list, the right message, the right timing, opt-in, desired by the recipient, etc., etc., etc. But there are already enough blog posts and articles about this. We want to focus on something that may be a little less obvious – how email can make or break brand perception.
Here are a few questions consumers have the opportunity to process through as they receive an email message from a brand…
1. Is the brand polite, or pushy? Did I ask for this communication? Is this just one too many emails more than I expected? Are they overstepping their “guest” position in my in-box?
2. Is the brand in touch with my needs and wants? Does the message make me feel like the sender knows who I am and what I want? Does every email I get from them try to sell me something, or are they trying to be more than that for me?
3. Does the look and feel of the message support the brand image? Does the design, the tone, the timeliness and the offer jive with what I like/know about the brand? Do I recognize it almost immediately as an extension of the brand promise?
4. Do I feel good enough about this email message that I may want to share it with my friends, co-workers and/or family? Am I proud or pleased to receive this email message because I like being associated with the brand?
5. Even if I don’t have time or the current desire to open this particular message, does the timeliness and relevance of the subject line reinforce why I like the brand?
I have a personal example that comes to mind. Talbots. I’m certainly their target audience. I tend to like classic clothing, and Talbots usually delivers. They target 40-60 year old women, most often business professionals. Their clothes are not expected to always be on sale, nor are they inexpensive. But they last, in style and quality. Not a brand for everyone, but certainly one that I like. Or liked.
One day I decided to buy a dress from Talbots online. It was the first time as I usually shopped in-store. While I was at their online store, I gladly signed up to receive emails about “occasional promotions and helpful bits of fashion advice” – that’s the way they described their emails. I assumed I would get quarterly emails regarding seasonal events, and occasional communications about how to update the classic style of Talbots. What I got instead was the beginning of a series of daily (yes – daily) emails offering me “20% discounts on a huge selection of items”. After clicking through a few times to see just how great their offers were, I found a very limited number of outdated styles that were usually only left in one color and one size. The 20% savings was a joke because the price was still ridiculous for something nobody apparently wanted. Oh, and the emails with fashion tips? Never got one.
It was disappointing to unsubscribe from a clothing line I felt connected to. But their email campaigning did not match up to the impression I had of who they were and how they take care of their customers, and their brand. My guess is someone without much brand expertise was put in charge of their email program. They ruined the brand for me. The Talbots brand I had in my mind no longer exists for me. What a shame.
On the other hand, there are numerous wonderful success stories about email campaigns enhancing brand images. Think Apple and Patagonia and even small companies like PS Audio. They’re doing it right. Primarily because they include email marketing as an important opportunity to market their brand, not just a retail message. (ah, there we go – brandtailing again!)
So, the next time you get an email from a company or brand you like, give it a deeper look. Dissect it for its brand message. Does it deliver? I hope so. If not, you may want to let them know.
Have you heard about the Mercedes-Benz USA Tweet Race? Four teams of two drivers were chosen from special Facebook and Twitter event pages, which added 75,000 new Mercedes-Benz fans and followers in a matter of weeks.
On Feb. 2, the four Tweet Race teams will leave New York, L.A., Chicago and Tampa in specially outfitted Mercedes-Benz vehicles, and head to Superbowl XLV in Dallas. They’ll be directed and fueled by people’s tweets along with help from team coaches who have large numbers of Twitter followers. Fellow tweeters are invited to join a team and help tweet to them with race clues and tips. V.I.P. trips for two to numerous MB sponsored events can be won by these tweet helpers, along with other prizes. Winning is more than just getting there first. It’s also the largest number of active Twitter helpers and a few other social media measurements. Oh, and the winning team? They each get a 2012 C-Class Coupe.
The team coaches aren’t just people with a large number of Twitter followers either, they’re celebrities from various industries. Musicians, athletes and TV stars. If their team wins, $25k goes to their favorite charity.
So, while the main media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) are free, let’s add up what this whole campaign will probably cost MB USA. Celebrity involvement, an easy $400k. Putting four MB’s into the race, at least $200k. Two winning C-Class coupes, $80k. Winning coaches charity of choice donation, $25k. Cost of coming up with the idea, developing and managing the entire campaign, probably $1 million. Paid online advertising banners to help promote the campaign, around $500k. Total cost of this FREE Media campaign that will probably involve 8 million active participants for 7 days, about $2.25 Million. Will it ultimately do better for Mercedes-Benz than their $6 million dollar Super Bowl ad planned for 4th quarter of this year’s game that has an anticipated 150 million viewers? Time will tell, but that’s not the point of this post.
The point is that marketers should start thinking differently about how they will be paying for online campaigns in this new world of free media. Historically, an ad campaign followed its own 80/20 rule. 80% of the campaign costs would go toward buying the media (TV, radio, print, outdoor, etc) and 20% would go toward developing and producing the creative. Although that 20% could be more or less, depending on the agency and the production value, the idea is that the majority of the expense would pay for the media.
In the new world of social media, that 80% is either substantially lower or gone completely. It’s obvious how advantageous this can be for smart marketers, but the challenge of creating a campaign using social media that draws interest and interaction takes a whole new level of brain power and creativity, a skill that a lot of agencies today don’t have, be they digital or traditional. Brain power and creativity that can succeed in taking a non-intrusive form of communication and make the right people want to view it, hear it and get involved with it is the greatest challenge in this new day. And that has a few Clio award-winning creatives asking for early retirement.
Although this post is not meant to be a self-promotion for Brandtailers, it is interesting to understand why we have more easily adapted and succeeded in this new world. Over our twenty plus years in business we’ve had more clients with small budgets than not. We’ve rarely had the luxury of letting the media weight do the job. For us, it’s always been the need to flex our creative idea muscles to help make something come alive and work without a lot of media support. It’s kind of like we’ve been training for the Olympics for a long time and it’s finally here.
But back to the purpose of this post: Let’s all help each other understand the new opportunities as well as the realities of what is truly needed in today’s marketing. Big media budgets may still be around for the recovering 10% of advertisers, but the other 90% is demanding success without major media dollars. Is it possible? We think so. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Our mantra has always been, “It’s the idea, stupid.” Feel free to use it.
Marketers are often afraid word-of-mouse will hurt more than help because it appears consumers take more time complaining than complementing in online reviews. But do businesses really need to fear these negative voices taking over their brand image? We say no. Not if the marketer commits to being actively engaged.
We don’t mean hiring one of the current snake oil reputation management firms that promises to have negative reviews removed, while posting an untrustworthy number of fabricated positive comments. Studies show customers see through these even faster than Google and Yelp’s supposedly legitimate algorithms. By actively engaged we mean offering a variety of different places for customers to form an opinion of your brand. Certainly Facebook and Twitter are two obvious sources, but there are plenty of other powerhouses. For example, what about making a name for your company as an expert in answering questions on related forums, or Ask.com, or even Yahoo!answers?
How about not only having a blog, but sharing it’s content via Digg, Stumble Upon, and Reddit? And don’t forget about YouTube. As the online world over saturates us with written content, people will defer more and more to video for everything from shopping decisions to consumer opinion. What about telling your brand story in pictures? There’s almost always a way, so use photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa.
And yet, just being on all these sites is not enough. Updating new and interesting content at least twice a week is a must – everywhere. But even more important than staying active is being creative and interesting. If you give customers other online opportunities to get to know you, you’d better give them good reason why they should prefer you.
Sounds like a lot of work, huh? It is. But just having a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account is not enough these days. You need to create two-way conversations everywhere you can. That way, even if some negative reviews pop up, customers have a variety of other venues to learn more about you and what you sell. Venues that can tell a great story – the story you want them to know.
What have we been saying? In today’s advertising and marketing, TRUTH SELLS. Here’s one more great example. Domino’s profits have just reached an all-time industry mark due to their radically transparent “Oh Yes We Did” campaign about their pizza being, to put it lightly, less-than-the-best.
Domino’s ran commercials and print ads admitting its old pizza sucked. It then introduced a new recipe by showing it to its staunchest critics. It continued the transparency theme by encouraging customers to alert Domino’s when the pizzas they ordered were not up to par. With today’s instant media exposure thanks to Flips, G4 iPhones and good old fashioned video cameras, you can imagine how many Domino’s Pizza haters uploaded their less-than-par pizzas to YouTube.
Russell Weiner, Domino’s CEO at the time the campaign launched, said he was pretty scared but still willing to risk the company’s reputation. “You’re a 50-year-old pizza company with 5,000 stores out there, these guys first tell you to go on air and say your pizza sucks, and then go out there and show how crappy it’s made,” he said. You wonder if Russell Weiner would have taken such a risk if he were not planning on leaving soon after the campaign launched. But after all, whatever happened with the campaign – and the company – would be his legacy, too. Lucky for everyone, it was working well enough that incoming CEO, Patrick Doyle, continued to support the effort with equal gusto.
How does one of a million “New and Improved” campaigns that today’s consumers are numb to have such dramatic success? By shocking people with its honesty and transparency that exposed Domino’s humility and possibility of failure. Patrick Doyle admitted that, if they fail at this endeavor, it could most likely be the end of Domino’s. Year-to-date, same store sales just exceeded 12%. That’s a new record in the pizza business.
Look at your company. Are you even capable of being transparent? If so, are you willing to market your company as flawed, but humble and honest? Most business owners reading this think we’re crazy. But remember, people don’t trust most advertisements. If you can’t get your message past this initially huge roadblock, maybe you’re wasting your money advertising. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to offer your customers some radical transparency, you’ve at least got a shot at breaking through that tough core of consumer mistrust. And when consumers trust you, they become your advocates.
Are you willing to at least think about what it would take? It might not be as scary as it sounds. It’s the way things are going, and getting there first while doing it right could mean an awfully big increase in market share. Something to ponder, eh?
Sounds like a crazy question until you look at the way Facebook, YouTube, Flicker and simple templated blogs can easily duplicate a website’s content these days. Besides, websites can be frustrating to maintain, challenging to keep current, and expensive to upgrade, right? Plus, with more people using Twitter and Facebook as search engines, who needs to pull up first in Google anymore? Remember the announcement a few months ago that Facebook surpassed Google in weekly internet traffic? Makes you think you might not need a website as much as you used to.
Wrong.
There’s no question that a company’s website is still it’s most powerful marketing tool. You own it, you control 100% of it’s content, you manage its destiny. Your Facebook page? Well, ask Mr. Zuckerberg what he’s thinking of next and that’s what your Facebook page will look, feel and behave like next month. Your YouTube channel? Have you ever gotten into its content management system? Nope. And it’s the same with most of the other marketing tools we mentioned. Today you need a great website more than ever.
In fact, there is even more opportunity for today’s corporate websites to drive business straight to your doorstep. But you still have to start by focusing on your brand. Forrester Research says 67% of today’s customers create their initial opinion of a company via their corporate website. This is the classic branding part of marketing, where you build trust with your consumer. But a well-designed website can also take your potential customer into the actual sales process at the right place and right time. A website that’s been designed to offer both a brand and retail message has proven to be stickier, with more time spent browsing through pages, clicking additional links and converting to leads or online sales. Look at Home Depot, Wahoos Fish Taco and Morgan Stanley for a few good examples. They have places within their sites where their call-to-action request is not only appropriate, but expected.
So then, what do you do with your other marketing tools like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and Flickr? Simple. Use them to create conversations. Get people (aka customers and potential customers) talking to you, about you, and for you. Sure, you can include calls-to-action when appropriate. But mix them up. Remember, people don’t want to be sold – but they love to buy from companies they trust. Build your website with this in mind and you’ll be on the right path to online marketing success.
