Category: Phil Bernstein

Why Logic Doesn’t Always Work in Marketing

It’s a cliche in the sales and marketing world — people make buying decisions emotionally, not logically. Tracy Coenen of WalletPop offers evidence from the world of cosmetics. Citing a university study of 300 women in England, Coenen reports that women using a product that isn’t working are likely to keep using it — and women using a product that actually works are likely to stop.

The researchers believe that fear may be the motivating factor behind this behavior. When the products work, women have less anxiety about the problem, so they stop using the stuff. When they think the products aren’t working and they’re concerned about their appearance, they stick with the products out of fear.

The lesson to those who depend on repeat business is to think about not just the problem that you’re in business to solve, but the underlying emotions of the people experiencing the problem — and how they really react when it’s solved.

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Of Hot Chicks and Peak Oil

My former colleague Randy White is an activist in the Peak Oil movement. On his Lawns to Gardens Blog he’s posted a split-screen video.

On the right side, a very attractive young woman, dressed for extremely warm weather, does a dance that would melt a glacier. On the left side, the same woman (I think), in much more subdued clothing, gives her views on what’s going to happen when all the oil runs out.

In addition to being an ironic commentary on the advertising business, it illustrates the attractions and pitfalls of using sex to sell:

1. I watched the video from beginning to end — nearly four minutes in all. This would not have happened in the absence of the hot dancing chick.

2. On the other hand, the speaker’s message did not register with me at all. I was too busy watching the hot dancing chick. 

We’ve all seen TV commercials that made us laugh, only to realize later that we can’t remember what the ad was for. Sex, like humor, can be an effective way of holding your prospect’s attention long enough to deliver the sales message. In order for the sales message register with the prospect, the sex or humor needs to be integrated into the pitch. Without that integration, your prospect won’t remember what you are trying to say.

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.

Direct Mail By The Pound

Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer has made a yearly tradition of keeping all of the direct mail he receives during the holiday season — and putting it on a scale.

 This year: 21.5 pounds. Up over two pounds from last year, and a more-than-50 percent increase from 2005. His post gives some examples of other things that weigh about that much:

  • 9.75 kilograms
  • About the equivalent weight of three newborn babies (or quintuplets for one couple)
  • Two bowling balls and a tray of white russians
  • A bit more than the average weight of the handbags of some women (contributing to a 30% rise in purse-related injuries)
  • The weight of a scarily large catfish caught in Missouri last summer

    • And the comments section has a very interesting dialog about the subject, with intelligent arguments on both sides.

    My question, for those of you who’ve been using direct mail for years: 

    With an increase in postage costs and (at least anectdotally) a significant increase in mail volume, how did your direct mail efforts pencil out in 2007? Is it still working as well as it did?

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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.

    Response is Not the Same as Results

    If you work with clients on their advertising, you’ll eventually encounter the business person who confuses response with results. Response is when the guys at the country club tell you how funny your commercials are. Results is when your commercials cause a whole bunch of good prospects to become good customers.

    Last month, I probably received ten “Elf Yourself” emails, and watched a bunch more. And yet, until I read Ron Shevlin’s smackdown on OfficeMax, it didn’t even really occur to me that OfficeMax wanted me to shop with them.

    OfficeMax definitely got response — according to Advertising Age, the campaign was watched by 110 million visitors. But it’s less clear whether the “Elf Yourself” campaign caused many of the visitors to go to an Office Max store and buy something.

    Shevlin does a terrific job reminding us what marketing is supposed to do, and how Office Max forgot what really matters. His jumping-off point is the Advertising Age article that calls the campaign “a winner”:

    My take: This is the stuff that drives CEOs/CFOs crazy. Nowhere in the article does it mention metrics like incremental awareness, improved brand affinity, or [heaven forbid] incremental sales as measures of success. According to the article, Alexa ranked Elf Yourself as a top 1000 site in 50 countries. OfficeMax does business in five.

    You want rules of viral web success? A viral web effort succeeds when it… [read the rest of the post here.]

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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.