Category: Portland advertising

Layaway Comes to Real Estate

Sometimes innovation means going backwards. And sometimes it means moving an old concept to a new industry.

Much has been made lately about the return of the layaway plan — a long-out-of-fashion retail program in which an item is kept at the store while the customer makes payments on it. Until recently, the layaway had been almost completely replaced by the credit card; customers preferred plastic because they could get instant gratification.

The credit crunch has made layaway popular again — Kmart, which never dropped it, is now putting renewed emphasis on the program. Parent company Sears Holdings recently brought it back to Sears after a 20 year absence.

Now, with mortgages difficult to come by, real estate companies and home builders are marketing the concept. According to Business Week,

K. Hovnanian Homes and Beazer Homes are offering contracts that let purchasers deposit downpayment installments in a no-interest escrow account. (Buyers who back out of such plans will lose whatever they’ve accumulated.)

This is a terrific example of what Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer call “Swipe-and-Deploy” marketing. As a concept, layaway is nothing new. But by moving the concept from traditional retail to real estate, a couple of enterprising companies are generating publicity, interest, and buyers.

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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.

A Hidden Opportunity for Bankruptcy Lawyers

If you’re an attorney specializing in personal bankruptcy, you’ll be interested in this recent article from the New York Times. You probably already know that the economic downturn has greatly increased the number of people filing for bankruptcy — those people are calling you now.

But here’s something that may be a little less apparent:

[Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law] said many borrowers had been left with the mistaken impression that they could no longer file. And, she argued, “the widespread perception that bankruptcy is not available to help families makes this economic crisis worse.”

In other words, there’s a large second group of potential clients for whom bankruptcy may be a good option. But they’re not calling you, or any other attorney —  they mistakenly think that because of the law changes of 2005, they won’t qualify. If you are the attorney who tells them that they may qualify, there’s an extremely good chance that you’re the lawyer they’ll use.

One way to accomplish this: a radio campaign telling these prospects to find out about their options by calling your office.

If you’re a Portland or Vancouver-area bankruptcy lawyer, I may be able to help you with this. Email me here, or call me at 503-323-6553.

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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.

Your Testimonials = Free Publicity

Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound, rarely crosses over into the realm of real-live advertising. But a recent blog post had a great tip for leveraging your paid ads:

If you buy newspaper or magazine ads and you’re pleased with the results, let your advertising sales rep know and offer a testimonial on what results you have seen from the ad. You might mention, for example, how much additional traffic or sales the ad brought to your website. That almost guarantees that if the publication uses your testimonial, it will include your URL. Newspapers love these testimonials and will often use them as “filler ads” that can be used if an advertiser pulls an ad at the last minute.

Although her post deals specifically with print, I can tell you that her approach will work with radio, too — if you’re a paying advertiser, many stations would be delighted to record your testimonial and use it when there’s unsold commercial inventory. If the ad is constructed carefully, it will act as an effective commercial for the station and your business.

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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.

Opportunity in a Recession

The Internet is a funny tool — one moment you’re watching some guy play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a ukulele, and the next you run into a really interesting piece on marketing and innovation in a downturn.


Thanks to a series of links — Brett Duncan’s Marketing in Progress blog sending me to Paul Dunay’s post on Marketing Profs — I recently stumbled onto a paper called “Innovation Through Recession” by Professor Andrew J. Razeghi of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. In 12 pages, he examines some companies who stuck their necks out during economic downturns, and reaped huge rewards. Among them are three from the Great Depression:


  • Henry Luce of Time, Inc., who started Fortune Magazine four months after the stock market crash of 1929.

  • Galvin Manufacturing, who put out a successful car radio in 1930 — the “motor-ola”.

  • Kraft Foods, who launched Miracle Whip 1933.

Since I toil in the persuasion industry, I was especially interested in Razeghi‘s description of a McGraw-Hill study of 600 companies — specifically, their approaches to advertising during the recession of the early ’80’s:


…businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-82 recession averaged higher sales growth during the recession and in the three years following. By 1985, sales of aggressive recession advertisers (those that either maintained or increased spending) had risen 256% over those that cut back on their advertising. Likewise, in 2001 another study found that aggressive recession advertisers increased market share 2 – 1/2 times the average for all businesses in the post-recession economy.

Professor Razeghi’s thoughts on why that might be, and how you should approach communicating with your customers and prospects in the current downturn, make for fascinating reading. You can download the full paper (registration required) here.

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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.

What You Want From a Testimonial

If your customers are willing to inconvenience themselves in order to do business with you, you’re doing something right.

Earlier this year, I wrote a radio commercial for a Portland dental practice around the recorded endorsement of a patient’s mother. She was willing to give her real name (huge in terms of establishing credibility) and talk about the fact that her daughter is terrified of dentists. She drives her daughter 300 miles from Eastern Oregon to Portland just to visit this particular doctor.

You can hear the mother’s own words here — the clip is labeled “Deana’s Testimonial”. Once I heard her speak, the rest of the commercial almost wrote itself.

We put the ad on the air (if you click on the link and decide to visit the practice, tell ’em you heard it on KPOJ) and it generated an almost immediate response — any dentist worth a 300-mile drive deserves to be on your shopping list. The ad pulled new patients for months, and when response began to die down we followed it with another ad using the doctor’s own personal story, which brought the patient count right back up.

I felt pretty darn good about the whole thing until Andy Sernovitz one-upped me with this woman who went out of her way to attend one of his speaking engagements.

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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.