Category: Branding

Steady Marketing Builds Trust

One of the most common — and frustrating — conversations that advertising/marketing professionals have with their clients is the one where the client just wants to advertise when they have a special event, or at “peak” times of the year.

  • The jeweler who only advertises at Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas
  • The car dealer who’s off the air for six months and then does a blitz for a weekend
  • The piano dealer who does a big newspaper campaign when they have a sale, and then goes quiet until the next one.

Those of us who’ve been at this for a while know the value of consistency — of getting into the customer’s head over time. The big sale campaign is so much more effective when the potential customers are already familiar with the merchant. And some businesses (The Shane Company is an example that comes to mind — love him or hate him, you know Tom Shane and why you should come to his store) are so successful at this that they never have to do a big sale.

Sometimes we win the argument, and sometimes we lose. Our most successful clients “get it”, stay in front of their customers, and reap the benefits. We do the best we can with the rest.

In an effort to win more of those arguments, I’m going to be borrowing the words of Seth Godin, who has a very powerful post on his blog this morning. The money quote, for me, is this:

The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.

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Maybe Your Prices Are Too Low

It’s a reflex in many sales situations — when you’re competing with others who offer a similar product or service, the first impulse is to cut your price.

What if, instead of reducing your price, you made sure you were the most expensive option in the category?

Columnist Harold Meyerson recently discussed the concept of positional goods as it relates to… hookers. The inspiration for the discussion was an alleged prostitution ring (one of whose alleged customers was Eliot Spitzer) called the Emperors Club, whose professional companions charged up to $5500 an hour.

Positional goods are those commodities that are more valuable than their run-of-the-mill counterparts because a special status attaches to them, since only a select few can have them. Since the Web sites on which prostitutes advertise indicate that the average hourly rate is around $300, the Emperors Club maximum rate, which is roughly 18 times higher, could be justified by the particular appeals and skills of its hookers. I haven’t conducted empirical research on this one, but let me just say: I doubt it.

I suspect that what makes a prostitute worth $5,500 an hour is that she costs $5,500 an hour. The value here doesn’t dictate the price. The price, rather, dictates the value. These women are available only to the wealthy; the ability to hire them, like the ability to live on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, means that you’ve made it. And even if your hour turns out to be a bit disappointing, that’s okay, because $5,500 doesn’t really mean anything to you — which just means you’ve really made it.

And there, I suppose, is the thrill. The power of being able to command the world’s priciest hooker, like the power of owning the world’s priciest real estate, could be a turn-on in itself. The power of dropping thousands and not even remembering what type of woman you’ve booked: Boy, are you ever something! Whether or not you’re getting one terrific woman, the transaction alone confirms that you’re one terrific dude.

I now charge $5500 per script. Give me a call if you’d like to get on the waiting list.

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A Couple of Reasons Your Advertising Isn’t Working

These come courtesy of Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo, this week entitled “Blind Spots”. Just two points to consider — read the whole thing here.

 2. reputation.
Consider the people who don’t buy from you. Are they buying elsewhere because they haven’t heard about your company, or is it because they have? I’ve never met a business owner willing to believe their company had a bad reputation…
 

 7. media myths.
Are you anxious to find a more effective media? If so, you’ve got really bad ads. I’ve never seen a company fail because they were using the wrong media or reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen thousands fail because they were saying the wrong things. A powerful message will produce results in any media.

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Like Clutter? You’ll Love Heathrow

If your travels take you through London’s Heathrow Airport, prepare for an onslaught of sales messages, each one competing for ever-smaller slivers of your attention. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, they’re opening a fifth terminal with “more advertising than almost any airport in the world.

The numbers are astounding, especially as they compare with current major US airports:

From giant billboards overlooking security lines to television screens in the underground train station, the ads have been positioned in ways BAA hopes will make them impossible to avoid. There are 333 billboards or posters and 206 flat-screen TV sets, which can change ads to target specific flights. By contrast, Los Angeles International has 34 advertising TV sets in the entire airport and New York’s John F. Kennedy International has 40, according to JCDecaux, a Paris-based specialist in outdoor advertising that was hired to design and sell the new Heathrow ad space to marketers…

Typical Terminal Five visitors will see between 50 and 120 ads, depending on whether they arrive at the airport by car or train and whether they fly domestic or international flights, says Julie France, U.K. managing director of unit J.C. Decaux Airport. That’s at least one ad every two minutes and 55 seconds, based on the two hours and 26 minutes an average traveler spends at Heathrow.

One ad every two minutes and 55 seconds. Our brains aren’t getting any bigger, are they? How are consumers supposed to process all of it? If this idea makes it to our shores, how are advertisers supposed to break through?

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The Power of Free Samples

If you’re wondering how effective free samples are in influencing consumer behavior, a new study by the Oregon Department of Human Services provides a powerful answer. According to an article on Salem-News.com,

Public health researchers analyzed survey responses from 2,684 new mothers. Almost 67 percent said they were breastfeeding at the time they left the hospital and were still given a free discharge pack containing infant formula. Further exploration of the data showed the women who received the free formula breastfed for a shorter time period than women who went home without a formula gift pack.

There is some debate as to whether this is good or bad from a public health standpoint (and one might spend some time considering the morality of the practice), but it’s certainly an indication that free samples have a strong effect on subsequent buying behavior. It’s hard to imagine a more personal decision than whether to breastfeed a baby, but the evidence indicates that sampling influences that decision more than a little.

 

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