Category: Branding

Branding Still Has Value

Branding’s gotten a bad rap lately. In an economy that has made marketing money increasingly difficult to come by, it’s not unreasonable to want a measurable return from every single dollar invested.

Because branding campaigns generally don’t have a measurable response mechanism — or even an offer to respond to — it’s easy to conclude that they don’t have any effect.

Sometimes they don’t.

And sometimes, a paragraph like this one jumps out of a Wall Street Journal article:

On a recent afternoon, at a supermarket in Chicago, Laura Gilligan confronted a salad-dressing aisle filled with dozens of varieties spread across two dozen brands. After staring for nearly a minute, Ms. Gilligan, a computer-company manager, chose Kraft Foods Inc.’s cucumber-tinged light ranch. “There’s too many choices,” she said. “I just went with Kraft because I know Kraft.”

What caused her to choose that dressing? It wasn’t a coupon, or a direct-mail pitch, or an email, or a pay-per-click ad. Kraft will never be able to figure out what “worked”.

And yet, something did. Faced with “dozens of varieties spread across two dozen brands”, shoppers often just grab something familiar and throw it into the cart.

What “worked” was the years, and dollars, that Kraft invested in building the Kraft brand.

This doesn’t mean that the direct-response advocates are wrong. But they aren’t completely right. Even in today’s economy, there’s real, tangible value in good branding.

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Sales Message In the Business Name: An Unsavory Example

I can’t endorse this, as it’s basically an attempt to deceive. And the same concept showed up in the movie “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan”.

But I have to admire, grudgingly, a guy who has the cojones to name his store “Going Out of Business.”

 

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

What’s Missing From This Ad?

This appeared in our local paper, The Oregonian, a few days ago:

outdoor ad

Here’s the text:

Our name has changed, but we haven’t. We’re still the same place we always were. We’re still the place with the most experience and the same great service. We’ve got 15 stores across the Northwest, and they all share our unbeatable knowledge of our customers’ needs. The name may be new, but we’re still your local experts.

There’s a crucial piece of information missing — information without which the core message makes no sense at all. Care to tell me what it is?

Leave a comment below.

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

What Are You Famous For?

Last week I had a conversation with the owner of a home improvement company on the East Coast. The business has been open for more than fifty years, and until fairly recently it concentrated exclusively on replacement windows. Name and location are removed here.

They have expanded into other areas of home remodeling, and changed their name from _____ Replacement Window Company to ________ Windows, Doors And More. In spite of this, the owner told me, the vast majority of new customers are still coming to him for windows. He wants to increase his non-window business, and asked what I thought of an advertising campaign in which he listed all the things his company can do — kitchens, bathrooms, master bedrooms, etc.

I advised against it — told him that the most successful campaigns focused on one thing. It was my opinion that the fastest way to introduce his non-window services to new customers was to advertise windows.

My reasoning: after fifty years, the business is famous, and trusted, for windows. That’s they’re “point of entry” — the thing new clients ask about first. Because of the equity he’s built, they will bring in more new customers, faster, by going after more window business. If their house has windows, it’ll have a kitchen… and a bathroom. Start the relatioinship with windows, and they’ll be back for other projects.

It wasn’t a great conversation. My guess is that when we hung up the phone, he still felt that a window campaign would close off other opportunities, while I continue to believe it will open them.

So it was with great interest that I read Tom Ray’s essay on the restaurant business in the Achievers Circle newsletter this week. Ray is the Executive Vice President of Jim Doyle & Associates, and has spent years traveling the country, working with business owners on their marketing plans.

Ray described a meeting he had with the owner of a casual dining restaurant. The establishment was famous for burgers, but the owner wanted to sell more steaks.

I call [this] the “Michael Jordan syndrome.” You’ve got the greatest basketball player who ever lived, and he wants to try his hand at baseball!? Just dunk it!

So what did I do? I brought back a strategy to sell more steaks… by advertising burgers!

The campaign Ray designed capitalized on the restaurant’s reputation for the Best Burger in Town, and advertised a specialty burger. The specialty burger is now the #2 seller on the menu, the campaign has been running for several months, and new traffic is way up.

In his case, burgers are his point of entry. If you want to sell more steaks, advertise burgers, get new faces in the door, give them a great experience, and tell them to come back for steaks. Like my colleague, Don “the Guru of Ads” Fitzgibbons, says, “If you want to sell parrots, advertise parakeets! Everyone who buys a $700 parrot bought a $29 parakeet first.”

For the East Coast home improvement guy, window are his point of entry — his “burger”, or  “parakeet”. He’ll get more kitchen and bathroom jobs by advertising windows.

What’s your point of entry?

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

Business Book Review — Scott Ginsberg’s New One(s)

Stick Yourself Out There

Scott Ginsberg’s new release advertises itself as “2 Books In 1”. The hook is that the you read the first 129 pages — titled Stick Yourself Out There — and then flip the book upside down to read the “second book”, Get Them to Come to You.

It’s a silly gimmick, just a way to make a 251-page book look different. To make it even sillier, there’s a short section in the middle that’s printed sideways.

It worked on me exactly the way Ginsberg wanted it to.

The day it arrived at my office, I found myself going out of my way to show it to several co-workers. Would I have done that if the book had just gone straignt from Page 1-251, all rightside-up?

Nope. Which illustrates one of the book’s underlying principles: Normal, says Ginsberg, is boring.

Stick Yourself Out There/Get Them to Come to You is a quick, breezy read, written in an informal style. Parts of it seem padded — the sections with wide spaces between paragraphs, and occasional pages written in a huge font, feel like attempts to get the page-count up.

But you’ll also find some very useful tips within the pages. Here are a few that resonated with me:

  • I’ve scheduled a recurring event on my calendar: the question “What two people do I know who should meet each other?” now shows up every Monday.
  • Ginsberg asks, “Is your [business] card SO good that people immediately show it to their friends?” My answer: nope. So I’m looking for a way to make my business card more memorable.
  • I’m compiling a Client List — every client I’ve worked with in the past five years. When it’s done, it’ll have its own page on this blog.

You may not want to go as far as Ginsberg does — he’s known as The Nametag Guy because he wears a nametag 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But if you’re looking for ways to set yourself apart from the competition, you’ll find much to chew on in Stick Yourself Out There/Get Them to Come to You.

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.