Category: Sales

Fly the Cluttered Skies

If you’ve been thinking that there are just too many messages coming at you from every direction… and you should just jump on a plane to get away from it all… think again.

  Assuming that your airline hasn’t just laid off the flight crew, here are a few things you can expect:

  According to the Wall Street Journal, five different airlines will be selling advertising on your boarding pass, courtesy of a marketing company called Sojern, Inc. “Sojern says the online check-in process will remain essentially the same until the boarding pass appears on a computer screen. Then the traveler will be able to click on the various ads and suggestions. When travelers print their boarding passes, the ads will automatically be printed, too. Fliers can, however, click a box to prevent the ads from being printed.”

  The New York Times tells us that US Airways “offers advertisers spots on ticket jackets, cocktail napkins and even air-sickness bags, [and] has, until recently, been one of the few airlines running tray-table ads.” More airlines are considering the tray-table ad idea. Meanwhile, the Times reports, JetBlue is selling advertising on the screens of their seat-back TV’s. (Thank you to Deborah Brody for the tip).

  USA Today reports that the baggage carousels at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport will have advertising on the conveyor belts. According to the article, “the baggage carousel provides advertisers a captive audience of travelers who ‘wait 15-plus minutes for their luggage to arrive,’ says Tracy Zwahlen of DoubleTake Marketing, which is selling and producing the ads.”

 Enjoy your trip.

 

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“We Had A Really Nice Ad”

I subscribe to Roy Williams‘ view that campaigns rarely fail because they use the wrong medium; they fail because they deliver the wrong message. But it’s an uphill battle — one of the most common objections an advertising salesperson hears is “We tried [name of medium here] and it didn’t work.”

The other day a jewelry store owner told me he wasn’t interested in meeting with me because “we tried radio once and it didn’t work. We had a really nice ad, and it didn’t bring us any business.”

If it didn’t bring you any business, I asked, what made it a really nice ad?

“Several people called us,” he replied, “and asked where they could buy the music.”

The most depressing part of the conversation is that he delivered the line completely without irony. Someone in my profession convinced him to spend good money on a campaign whose most memorable feature was the music.

Years later, this business owner still believes that this ineffective commercial is how a jewelry store radio ad is supposed to sound. And that — Tom Shane and Woody Justice notwithstanding — radio won’t work for his store.

If he’d been willing to meet with me, I might have showed him what a really, really nice ad sounded like. An ad that sells jewelry, not music.

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Membership Fees and Repeat Purchasing

Church of the Customer’s Ben McConnell uses the airlines’ current troubles as a springboard to discuss membership fees — would instituting a membership fee (like Costco, etc) in frequent-flyer programs generate real loyalty?

Research in the 1990s by Alan S. Dick in the Journal of Product and Brand Management might indicate yes. In conducting computerized shopping experiments focused on video store rentals, Dick found that a membership fee can become “psychologically amortized” in the minds of customers, making them “hesitant to switch as the would feel uncomfortable ‘wasting’ the investment” of the membership fee.

In other words, membership fees increase repeat purchases.

Worth considering in many retail businesses, actually. If you’ve instituted a membership program in your business — or attempted to — I’d love to hear about it. How did it work, or not work?

Leave a comment below.

Maybe It’s Not the Price

When a product or service isn’t selling, the first reaction is often to cut the price. Sometimes the price cut works, but in many cases price was never the issue.

From the world of sports comes news that Barry Bonds’ agent has offered Bonds’ services to all 30 major league baseball teams for a pro-rated share of the major league minimum salary — $390,000. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the discount this represents, you should know that Bonds made $15,800,000 last year.

To generate a “sale” of Barry Bonds’ services, his agent cut the price by 97%. Which is the most he could cut it without violating the collective bargaining agreement. And to sweeten the deal, he offered to have Barry spend his entire salary on tickets for underprivileged youth. So Barry Bonds, in essence, is available for free to any major league team who wants him.

There are no takers.

Got something that isn’t selling? Maybe price isn’t the issue.

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How Important is the Call to Action?

Nearly fifty years ago, social psychologist Howard Leventhal conducted experiments in which he tried to convince Yale University seniors to get a tetanus shot. Leventhal initially divided the seniors into several groups, and gave each group different versions of a seven-page booklet on the disease and its effects.
 
According to Malcom Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, there was a “high-fear” version of the booklet, with dramatic descriptions and photographs of the disease, and a “low-fear” version with toned down descriptions and no pictures.  

A few months later, Leventhal redid the experiment, with one change: this time “…he included a map of the campus, with the university health center building circled and the times the shots were available clearly listed.”

This change, by itself, increased the vaccination rate from 3% to 28%. Nine times as many students got the shot when they were told how to do so.
“…Of the 28% who got inoculated, an equal number were from the high-fear and low-fear group. Whatever extra persuasive muscle was found in the high-fear book was clearly irrelevant… The second interesting thing is that, of course, as seniors they must have already known where the health center was, and doubtless had already visited it several times already.
“The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk… to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.”
Like Leventhal, your goal when you advertise is to persuade your prospects and customers to do something.
 
Your odds of success increase greatly when you make your message practical, personal, and memorable by telling them exactly what to do, and how to do it.
 

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Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.