Category: Customer Service

Good Advertising Can Kill a Bad Business

I read that somewhere — unfortunately, not even Google can remind me where.

But it came to mind the other day when I met with the owner of a home improvement company. I’d put together a very powerful ad campaign for him, and we were scheduled to hit the airwaves in six days. But he wanted to postpone it.

My initial reaction was to try to talk him out of postponing. It’s been a rough few months in the industry, and I was convinced that the campaign would truly enter the conversation that homeowners were having as they thought about remodeling.

But he stopped me short with a surprising statement — in the past two weeks, his traffic had jumped considerably. Interest rates had dropped to the point where buyers were finally being lured back into the game. His salespeople were (finally!) so busy scheduling jobs that they couldn’t handle any new ones. He didn’t want the phone to ring until he had more people in place to take care of the new customers.

Although it took money out of my pocket, he was right to postpone. If the campaign had launched and gotten the job done (and trust me… it’s good), he risked disappointing and angering his new customers by putting them off or doing shoddy work. They would have ultimately taken their business elsewhere, and the word-of-mouth would have been disasterous.

Better to wait a few weeks and get it right.

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The Downside to Viral Marketing

Much talk recently about how social media and viral marketing are changing the way things are advertised and sold. Done well, it has some real advantages for marketers. Nancy Arter on RRW Consulting’s Direct Marketing blog has a very interesting post on the subject. Here’s an excerpt of her view:

“The idea of customers selling on behalf of marketers is an idea whose time has come. Think of all of the time we spend trying to isolate that perfect consumer or business that may be willing to hear our message. Think about the hours of sleep lost over whether the DM campaign that’s hitting mailboxes in the next week will reap us a .5% or a 1.5% response rate — and the repercussions of either. With this shift, it’s all about the customers preferring our product, and preferring it so much that they discuss why they prefer it. What a concept!”

That’s the potential upside. Here’s the potential downside, courtesy of Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo:

“Word-of-Mouth is the new Mass Media. Video games and cable TV stripped our kids of their innocence at an early age, but the Technology that robbed them of idyllic childhood also empowered them with cell phones, blogs and blackberries.

Viral marketing wasn’t created by the advertising community. It’s simply the result of a horizontally-connected generation (1.) sharing their happy discoveries with each other and (2.) trying to protect one another from mistakes.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS: It’s no longer enough just to have great advertising. When your customers carry cell phones and can email all their friends with a single click, you need to be exceptionally good at what you do.”

Viral marketing only works if the consumers doing the viralizing (a word I believe I just made up) are happy with what they bought. If they’re not, they’ll take it out on you with blogs, forums, and Amazon’s Customer Reviews. If the product is shoddy or the service is poor, the chorus of consumer voices can quickly wipe out any gains an advertising campaign can make.

 

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

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

What You’re Facing in 2008

Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo has a remarkably clear-eyed look at the forces you’re up against as you go to market in a rapidly changing society. Scroll down to “What to remember when selling in 2008.”

Inspirational excerpt:

 “Naiveté is rare today. Your customer is equipped with a bullshit detector that is highly sensitive and amazingly accurate. And the younger the customer, the more accurate their bullshit detector.

When selling, remember: If you don’t admit the downside, they won’t believe the upside.”

When you read the full article, pay special attention to #4, Word of Mouth is the New Mass Media.”

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

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

Advertising Invades the Shopping Cart

The advertising onslaught you face at the supermarket is about to increase — a company called MediaCart, in partnership with MicroSoft, is unleashing targeted video advertising in the cart itself. According to Online Media Daily,

Using Microsoft’s technology, MediaCart will execute anonymous ad targeting through data obtained from ShopRite’s customer loyalty card program. For the system to work, shoppers must first scan their card in the system. They then receive ads and promotional offers based on past purchases and saved shopping lists, which can be uploaded from a home PC.

Will shoppers love this, or will they set their carts on fire in protest? Stay tuned — the experiment will begin later this year at ShopRite stores on the East Coast.

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

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

Direct Mail Goes On a Diet?

It’ll be interesting to see next year’s version of Ben McConnell’s weigh-in : RRW’s Direct Marketing Blog reports that the Direct Marketing Association has eliminated the $1 fee it had been charging consumers to be part of its opt-out service, the DMA Mail Preference Service.

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I’ve written a white paper called The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them. It’s a study of some of the most common ways that companies waste their advertising dollars — along with suggestions to make those dollars work harder and smarter. Request your free copy here.