Category: Branding

One Piece of Carry-On

I spend a lot of time working with business owners on the most persuasive way to tell their stories. One of the most common desires I encounter is the desire to talk about everything in the commercial.

It’s physically possible to talk about four different things in the same commercial. And give an address, web site, and phone number, too. As long as you don’t mind that your customers and prospects won’t remember anything about your message once the commercial’s over.

For 14 years, I’ve tried a variety of ways to convince my customers that keeping their messages simple will make them more memorable. This week, I’m going to borrow an image from Bill Schley.

Schley, author of “Why Johnny Can’t Brand”, and the forthcoming “The Micro-Script Rules”, was interviewed recently by Jim Doyle for his coaching program. In making an argument for simplicity in message, he used an image from the airline business:

One piece of carry-on.

Passengers boarding an airplane are allowed to carry on one piece of luggage. That piece must be small enough to fit in the overhead bin above the seat.

Schley says that your prospects, when they hear or see your ad, have the ability to retain one, and only one, piece of information. The customer’s mind is the “overhead bin”. The object of your commercial is to get the customer to place it in the overhead bin, and then act on it by  doing business with you,  repeating it to others, or both.

Stuff too much information into your commercial, and the message won’t stay in the overhead bin long enough for your prospect to pull it back out again.

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Contest: Can You Out-Market the W.H.O.?

From the world of medicine comes news that the World Health Organization will no longer use the term “swine flu”.

[W.H.O. spokesman Dick] Thompson said the flu name change comes after the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency expressed concerns that the term “swine flu” was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to order the slaughter of pigs.

Makes sense to me, and as one of millions who read “Charlotte’s Web” as a child, I sympathize.

The object of the exercise, then, is to come up with another name for the general public to use instead. It’s got to be accurate, politically correct (this is the World Health Organization), and memorable so that it enters common usage.

So, what did you come up with, Mr. Thompson?

“Rather than calling this swine flu … we’re going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A,” he said.

I think my readers can do better than that. Frankly, my cat could do better. But I think you could do better than my cat. So here’s a little contest:

Come up with a replacement name for swine flu. Leave it in the comment field. The winning entry will receive my copy of Scott Ginsberg’s “How to Be That Guy”.

Phil Bernstein will be the sole judge. The winning entry must be catchy, reasonably clean, and not insulting to any ethnic group (for example, a local radio host has become fond of “Mexi-Flu”. We”re not going there).

Contest is open through Sunday, May 3. Leave your entry in the comments field.

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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.

Two Or Three Words

Reading Scott Ginsberg’s How to Be That Guy this evening, I happened upon this gem:

PICTURE THIS: you’re sitting in the CNN Green Room, ready to be interviewed about your cool new idea, company, or product. After giving the producer the correct spelling of your full name, she asks you, “Oh, and one last thing before you go on the air in five minutes: what two or three words do you want written underneath your name?”

It’s a valuable reality check — you might have a multi-page web site or brochure. You might have a complex and sophisticated multiple-media campaign going. But when one of your customers mentions you to a friend, relative, or co-worker, the description may only be a few words.

So this could be a valuable exercise in boiling your selling proposition down to its essence — try to describe the value you provide in three words or less.

I’m Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert.

Who are you?

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page 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.

New Era Makes a Marketing Challenge Go Away… Almost

The Sunday New York Times has a look at American Idol contestant Adam Lambert. Lambert is…

1. Widely rumored to be gay, and

2. Widely considered a favorite to win the competition

Homosexuality has always had a significant place in the arts, but because the vast majority of the marketplace is straight, those in charge of marketing gay artists have often tried to hide those artists’ sexual identity. The article, while focusing on the “is he or isn’t he” speculation, also shows how far we’ve come from the days when

…studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors “to lie from morning to night.”

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, “for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra,” sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay… When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: “No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society.” He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

It’s worth noting the Boston Red Sox did not field a black player until that same year: 1959. Fifty years later, race doesn’t even register when the Most Valuable Player results are announced — but we still haven’t seen a gay Major League Baseball player come out during his playing career.

A previous American Idol runner-up,  Clay Aiken,  came out publicly — several years after his turn on the show was over. A half century after Liberace’s lawsuit, Adam Lambert can compete effectively in the most mainstream music competition imaginable, and allow the media to speculate as much as it wishes.

But he won’t quite let himself take the final step. The choice may be his, or his handlers’, or the show’s.

We’ll know that sexuality has ceased to be viewed as a marketing problem when a contestant comes out before the  votes are cast — and the New York Times doesn’t care.

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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 at 503-323-6553.

Ford Hands Over the Keys to Fiesta Marketing

When I started working for the New York Mets in 1986, there was a nice clean line between the fans and the game:

1. The players played the game

2. The fans watched.

There were exceptions — I remember a particularly violent Upper-Deck encounter between a group of intoxicated corrections officers and everyone around them — but in general, the customers were expected to buy their tickets, watch, and go home.

By the mid-90’s, things had begun to change. Fans were demanding more opportunities to interact with the team, and we had responded with baby steps such as letting them run the bases after some games. Our VP of Operations, who had worked for the team since 1962, was not happy about it.

“All of a sudden, the fans think they’re part of the show,” he said. “They’re not the show. Why can’t they just watch and enjoy it?”

I was reminded of this, and how it has played out in marketing since then, when I read this article about Ford’s new campaign to market the Fiesta:

The company has picked 100 young, Web-savvy drivers to get behind the wheel of its new Ford Fiesta subcompact for six months and post their impressions on sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

The marketing campaign starts later this month, almost a year before U.S. consumers will be able to buy the Fiesta. Since the Fiesta name has been absent from the U.S. market for years and Ford hasn’t been in the subcompact market for a long time, the company has to find a way of turning heads away from top-selling small cars like Toyota Motor Corp.’s Yaris and Honda Motor Co.’s Fit.

The most interesting part of this to me is that Ford has accepted, and perhaps embraced, the fact that although they’re paying for the whole thing,

[Ford] will have no control over the online material posted by the 100 participants. That means some could be bluntly critical of the car and Ford won’t be able to stop it.

The marketing world has changed from the days when it was the advertiser’s job to broadcast the commercial, and the consumer’s job to watch it. Like it or not, your customers are now part of the show.

Ford deserves congratulations for recognizing this — here’s hoping the Fiesta is good enough to justify their faith.

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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 at 503-323-6553.