Category: Marketing

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

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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.

Advertisers Fight the Filters: The Battle Continues

For years, consumers have sought ways to avoid and filter out advertising. And advertisers have fought back with ways over, around and through the filters. Here are two recent developments in the battle:

Product placement: as TIVO has damaged television advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward past commercials, product placement has become an increasingly important source of revenue for broadcasters. Allesandra Stanley of The New York Times, tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, suggests an Emmy for the Product Placement category, and rates many recent efforts to integrate products into shows.

Twitter Advertising: meanwhile, Tech.blorge points to an AdWeek report that Pay-Per-Tweet is coming to Twitter. According to AdWeek:

Izea, formerly called Pay Per Post, is readying a Twitter ad platform called Sponsored Tweets that will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.

In a test campaign, Blockbuster tweets carried the hashtag #spon to indicate a sponsored message. Tech.blorge points out that this may give Twitter users a way to filter the messages right back out again:

Twitter users have been notoriously fickle about spam entering the site, but so long as the Tweets carry a hashtag, there will be solutions beyond simply unfollowing the user putting out the messages.  Thanks to third-party services such as TweetDeck, a method for users to read the messages on their desktop, you can set up filters to hide any messages with specified hashtags that you want.  It’s easy to imagine that the #spon posts will quickly get filtered out by the majority of users, which leads one to believe the system will either be a failure, or users will just conveniently forget to include the tag.

Someone, no doubt, is working on a way to beat the filters. And so it goes.

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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.

The Power of a Good Radio Jingle

When I lived in New York (1986-1994), the Kew Motor Inn in Queens was a regular radio advertiser.

The Kew offered “short-stay” rates — if you were looking for a discreet, 2-3 hour staycation with someone special, The Kew Motor Inn had a theme room for you.

The commercials often ended with a short jingle. This afternoon I asked my wife whether she remembered the lyrics. I had to start it off, but three words into it she started singing along:

Our summer romance always begins
With me and you at the Kew Motor Inn!

Neither of us ever went there when we lived in New York (at least I know I didn’t…), but nearly fifteen years after having last heard the jingle, we can both still sing it from memory.

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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.

Brochure Copy Word Choice: A Nice Example

While sitting in the reception room of a local med spa (a sales call, I assure you), I picked up a brochure for a product called Radiesse.

wrinkle correction

The key word here is “correction”.

They could have said “filler”  (in fact, they do, in the inside copy). Or “smoother”. Or “eraser”. But “correction” gives the process a completely different implication.

You correct an injustice. You correct poor vision.

“Corrected” changes wrinkles from a natural result of the aging process to a medical problem. And using Radiesse is converted, in the target’s mind, from an expensive exercise in vanity to a necessary treatment of a health condition.

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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.