Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Brands That “Pay it Forward” are Winning

What’s the best way to win advocates for your brand? TRUST. What’s the best way to win trust? Be helpful. What’s the best way to be helpful? Give consumers useful information they wouldn’t expect to get free. Information that will save them time, save them money, make them smarter, make them happier, make them feel better about themselves – and you.

Since its inception, the Nordstrom brand has centered around being helpful, right? Like a phone call telling you they remembered you were looking for shoes to go with the suit you bought last month, and they just got the perfect pair in. Or how about the American Express openforum.com, a free website with tons of information that claims huge success in helping business owners succeed. Oh, and its content contributors are donating their brains and talent at no charge to American Express.

It’s easy to talk about big brands like these, but how about the success some smaller brands are enjoying due to their helpfulness? Like Kellogg Garden Products, with a website full of gardening tips from soil calculators to fun kid gardening activities. Their website Analytics show a huge percentage of visitors time being spent on the pages they’ve built simply to be helpful, and their brand recognition confirms this.

Big or small, these brands understand they must give in order to receive. Paying it forward may end up being the most successful marketing mantra for the 21st Century. The question is, is your brand ready?

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Email vs. Regular Mail – Something for Marketers to Think About

Is snail mail dead for marketers? Does it make sense to spend an average of 65 cents per piece when email is virtually free? Maybe not, but before you replace mailbox marketing with inbox marketing, put your consumer hat on for a moment and consider this scenario…

You get to work in the morning and your email in-box awaits you with several dozen messages. Since time is your most precious commodity, you glance through the list quickly to find those you must read and respond to. The rest, especially the ones you didn’t ask for, or the ones you subscribed to so long ago that you forgot you ever signed up for them, are a nuisance. If you had the time you would unsubscribe, but that’s never as easy as it sounds.

When you get home from work you open your regular old mailbox. It, too, is filled with messages you didn’t ask for from marketers you don’t know. They may or may not get your attention, but the fact that they are in your mailbox does not feel like the invasion of your privacy that you felt when you found this stuff in your email in-box, right?

You expect to receive advertising messages in your regular mailbox. You’ve gotten them for years. You might not read the marketing piece, but when you see the brand’s name on the mailer you don’t think ill of it because it went into your mailbox. But you did with the ones in your email, didn’t you?

If we marketers continue to focus on building trust with the consumer, we have to think about this piece of the puzzle. Don’t intrude where you’re not welcomed. Don’t make a marketing decision just because it’s inexpensive. It could end up being much more costly to your brand than you ever imagined.

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What Can We Learn From SXSW?

South By South West (SXSW). Austin, Texas. Nine crazy days mixed with tech, music, and film. It’s probably the next Sundance. Definitely the biggest music gathering. But it also includes this thing called interactive. Four years ago the tech portion was about 2,000 people. This year they say it’s 15,000 just for interactive. Impressive? Yes. But I’ve heard plenty of grumblings in the halls that it has grown too fast and left many of the 15,000 interactive attendees scratching their heads and asking themselves why they came.

Certainly this is a networking nirvana. But for many of the 15,000 who came here to also learn, they wandered aimlessly looking for a decent seminar, workshop, or panel, of which there were few that truly delivered. Even Guy Kawasaki trashed Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, for his boring Keynote interview, of which more than half the room packed with 2,000 people walked out.

Too bad.  Chris Brogan’s post today addressed this. Hopefully the powers at SXSW will get the feedback they need to have this venue expand appropriately and fix the problem for next year. The opportunity is awesome. There are just obvious challenges to face when something this big grows so fast.

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A New Way of Thinking About Marketing and Advertising Expenditures

Although it’s hard to say Southern California has a rainy season, what little rain we did have earlier this year included a couple of pretty good downpours. In the midst of one of them, I stopped by Kragen Auto Parts store to buy new windshield wiper inserts for my car. What I saw was an amazing example of customer service. As I pulled into their parking lot, I saw a half dozen or so Kragen employees helping customers replace their wiper blade inserts. Now, a set of wiper blade inserts usually costs under $10.00. It’s not a huge profit center for a store like Kragen. But the good will that was being made in that parking lot was priceless.

Good Will vs. Media DollarsGood Will vs. Media Dollars. Hmmmm…. So, I thought to myself, how can a business like Kragen take this concept and make it a home run online brand marketing success?

What if they had some local customers following them on Twitter and, when it started raining, they sent out a message offering FREE wiper blade inserts to the first 100 visitors. Do you think they’d have a huge line at the door? Marketing history says they would.

But wait, how can a store give out 100 sets of wiper blade inserts and justify the expense? At $10 a set that could add up to $1,000 in product! Yup. It sure could. But how much did it cost in media expenditures to get 100 people in the door? How much would it cost if they tried doing this on TV, or some other form of traditional media? And how could the message be distributed in such a timely manner, and thanks to Twitter, shared so quickly with friends, coworkers, family and other miscellaneous Twitter followers who get the offer re-tweeted to them? How much good will could be created by helping customers out, free of charge, at a time when they needed something pertinent to their immediate safety?

What’s the biggest challenge with this type of new marketing concept? Changing marketers ways of thinking. Getting out of the old mindset that you spend money on the media, and the creative, not on good will. That’s old thinking. And it’s really, really expensive thinking. Why not take just a tiny piece of all that money to be saved from expensive traditional media buys and instead use it to be helpful. Yes, even use it to give something away. With today’s consumer, being helpful can pay off ten-fold. Seeing those Kragen guys standing out in the pouring rain smiling and helping customers was enough to earn my loyalty.

By the way, did I happen to mention that almost every customer in the parking lot that day was holding a Kragen bag with other things they had purchased?

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5 Responses to “A New Way of Thinking About Marketing and Advertising Expenditures”

  1. OP: I might be daff (lord knows I have been told lol) but you made absolutely no sense…

  2. In your opinion is retail still affected by recession? December sale looked good, however it seems there is cautious optimism with many retail companies in the throes of recession. Wal-Mart has just fired close to 14,000 employees! What is your opinion?

  3. thanks !! very helpful post!

  4. Wonderful piece of writing! This will guide a lot of people find out more about this subject. Are you keen to include things like video clips coupled with these? It would surely help out. Your explanation was spot on and because of you; I will not have to explain everything to my buddies. I can simply point them in this article!

  5. Cheril says:

    I think it is still affected due to people’s cautiousness, and I doubt it will return to the excessive spending of the previous years for a long time. But that’s ok. We can’t survive in America just by consumerism. These tough times will force bigger changes, hopefully for the better, on our economy. Maybe we can actually become an export country again!

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Consumer Behavior in a Post-Crisis Economy

It’s only Tuesday and it’s already been an interesting week. Depending on what news you listen to or read, the economy might be in store for a “good-but-not-great-and-certainly-cash-not-credit” holiday shopping season. With Black Friday just around the corner, this TED talk by John Gerzema of Young and Rubicam seemed like a timely 16-minute video to show my staff today. So I thought I’d pass it along here. John has a great background in consumer behavior and advertising, along with being co-author of a terrific new book, The Brand Bubble.


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A Day in the Life of Chris Brogan

We just finished putting together a 5 minute video summary of our day with Chris Brogan last month. (Thank you John!) The day started with his VIP meet and greet, then to lunch at Wahoo’s with Skip1.org, and then  to a book signing at Barnes and Noble with Kogi BBQ. After all that, we took him over to a Chapman Ad Club exclusive interview and he finished the evening with his talk in Memorial Hall at Chapman University (and we tried to capture it all in just 5 minutes!)

Take a look and be sure to share with friends!

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One Response to “A Day in the Life of Chris Brogan”

  1. Great article. There’s a lot of good info here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Fedora with the latest beta of Firefox, and the look and feel of your blog is kind of funky for me. I can read the articles, but the navigation doesn’t function so great.

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