Category: Portland marketing

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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Domino’s Home Invasion… Through Your TiVo

The battle for consumers’ attention is a constant game of cat-and-mouse. Consumers try to filter out the onslaught of messages, and marketers coming up with new ways to get past the barriers.

The war will escalate soon, as Domino’s pizza invades the living room, trojan-horse-style. According to the Wall Street Journal, Domino’s has figured out a way to turn TiVo’s fast-forward feature to its advantage.

In a new promotion with TiVo Inc., Domino’s Pizza Inc. will begin taking orders using only a TV set from customers who have broadband TiVo service. When a customer forwards through a commercial for Domino’s, TiVo will flash a pop-up advertisement that asks the customer if she would like to order a pizza, then direct her to a Domino’s ordering screen.

One of the selling points of TiVo, and other DVR’s, is that viewers can skip the commercials — a huge threat to the “free” TV model. Why, after all, should a company spend money on television advertising if nobody’s going to watch? So on a professional level, I’m fascinated with Domino’s attempt to force its way past the filters.

Results, I suppose, can be measured in two ways: directly (how much money they make from orders via TiVo), and indirectly (same store sales in markets where these messages are delivered).

Will viewers really order pizza through their televisions? Or will they take their TiVo’s and throw them in the river? Stay tuned.

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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.

Is Now The Time to Raise Your Prices?

There are plenty of people who will tell you that a recession is a great time to increase your marketing budget. Me, for instance.

But I was intrigued to read Paul Brown’s column in the New York Times, examining the theory that in addition to increasing your marketing, it may be possible — and even proper — to raise your prices when everyone else is lowering theirs.

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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.

So… Why’d You Mail This To Me?

I received a piece of direct mail today from Energy Trust of Oregon.

On the front it said “Light up the Savings! Free!”, with a picture of a compact fluorescent light bulb. On the back was the offer — fill out the form and get four CFL bulbs for free. There’s only one problem:

I’m not eligible.

The offer is only for households who “heat with oil, propane, kerosene or wood… If you heat with electricity supplied by PGE or Pacific Power, or natural gas supplied by NW Natural, you are not eligible for this CFL offer.”

Thanks, guys! I’m a NW Natural customer, so the only useful thing I can do with this particular piece of junk mail is burn it for warmth.

Perhaps it’s not possible to separate out electric-heat households from the folks who just buy electricity for other stuff… but couldn’t they at least have bought a list of NW Natural customers and cleaned those households off the mailing list?

Instead they paid to print the piece and mail it — with a real first class stamp, no less — to thousands of households who will look at the offer, find it appealing, and then learn that they don’t qualify.

In addition to the money they wasted on the mailing, they’ve lost some credibility with those households, who are more likely to look askance at the next Energy Trust offer.

It’s a shame… as quasi-public institutions go, Energy Trust is one of the good guys. But this is a case of direct mail gone bad.

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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.

Metaphor, Bad Taste, and Salesmanship in Advertising

This afternoon, Rick Lewis directed my attention to AdAge.com. On the site, Matthew Creamer salutes Kimberly-Clark, whose brand Kotex U is

…keeping a cheeky Australian campaign featuring a woman, her animated beaver and the tagline “You’ve only got one. So for the ultimate care down there, make it U.” Not surprisingly the ad has sparked complaints (over 150), but it’s also helped Kotex gain two share points in the $250 million market and overcome the perception that it’s not as reliable as rival products.

He’s got the TV ad embedded on the site, and it’s worth watching both for the junior-high-quality laugh and because it teaches a good advertising lesson.

Because of legal and/or societal restrictions, Kimberly-Clark can’t discuss what the product does, or what its target consumer is supposed to do with it. So they’ve got to tell their story without actually saying anything.

The beaver both catches your attention and reminds you (in case you need reminding) where the product goes. The scenes of attractive women having fun tell consumers that with Kotex U, they can live their lives without worrying about… well, what they would otherwise worry about. And the observation “You’ve only got one” drives home the point that when choosing a feminine hygiene product, it’s important to choose the right one — Kotex U.

Kotex U employs risque humor in the best possible way — as a tool to deliver a strong sales message.

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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.