Category: Uncategorized
Steady Marketing Builds Trust
One of the most common — and frustrating — conversations that advertising/marketing professionals have with their clients is the one where the client just wants to advertise when they have a special event, or at “peak” times of the year.
- The jeweler who only advertises at Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas
- The car dealer who’s off the air for six months and then does a blitz for a weekend
- The piano dealer who does a big newspaper campaign when they have a sale, and then goes quiet until the next one.
Those of us who’ve been at this for a while know the value of consistency — of getting into the customer’s head over time. The big sale campaign is so much more effective when the potential customers are already familiar with the merchant. And some businesses (The Shane Company is an example that comes to mind — love him or hate him, you know Tom Shane and why you should come to his store) are so successful at this that they never have to do a big sale.
Sometimes we win the argument, and sometimes we lose. Our most successful clients “get it”, stay in front of their customers, and reap the benefits. We do the best we can with the rest.
In an effort to win more of those arguments, I’m going to be borrowing the words of Seth Godin, who has a very powerful post on his blog this morning. The money quote, for me, is this:
The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.
Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.
Maybe Your Prices Are Too Low
It’s a reflex in many sales situations — when you’re competing with others who offer a similar product or service, the first impulse is to cut your price.
What if, instead of reducing your price, you made sure you were the most expensive option in the category?
Columnist Harold Meyerson recently discussed the concept of positional goods as it relates to… hookers. The inspiration for the discussion was an alleged prostitution ring (one of whose alleged customers was Eliot Spitzer) called the Emperors Club, whose professional companions charged up to $5500 an hour.
Positional goods are those commodities that are more valuable than their run-of-the-mill counterparts because a special status attaches to them, since only a select few can have them. Since the Web sites on which prostitutes advertise indicate that the average hourly rate is around $300, the Emperors Club maximum rate, which is roughly 18 times higher, could be justified by the particular appeals and skills of its hookers. I haven’t conducted empirical research on this one, but let me just say: I doubt it.
I suspect that what makes a prostitute worth $5,500 an hour is that she costs $5,500 an hour. The value here doesn’t dictate the price. The price, rather, dictates the value. These women are available only to the wealthy; the ability to hire them, like the ability to live on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, means that you’ve made it. And even if your hour turns out to be a bit disappointing, that’s okay, because $5,500 doesn’t really mean anything to you — which just means you’ve really made it.
And there, I suppose, is the thrill. The power of being able to command the world’s priciest hooker, like the power of owning the world’s priciest real estate, could be a turn-on in itself. The power of dropping thousands and not even remembering what type of woman you’ve booked: Boy, are you ever something! Whether or not you’re getting one terrific woman, the transaction alone confirms that you’re one terrific dude.
I now charge $5500 per script. Give me a call if you’d like to get on the waiting list.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.
Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.
Tapping into Consumer Anxiety
Perry Marshall likes to say that the object of marketing is to enter the conversation that the prospect is already having in his or her head. A great example of this is featured in the New York Times this weekend.
The item in question is called LENA (for “language environment analysis”). If you’re the parent of a young child and are wondering if your child’s language skills are progressing at an appropriate rate, this $400 device promises to answer the question.
The Times describes the inspiration for the device this way:
The man behind the vision, Infoture’s founder, Terrance Paul, has made a fortune selling software to assess children’s reading skills. His current venture was inspired by a well-known 1995 study that found that professional parents uttered more than three times as many words to their children as did parents who were on welfare. The children in the less talkative homes turned out to be less verbal and to have smaller vocabularies. Other studies have suggested that these gaps affect later professional success.
One way to close the language gap, Paul reasoned, would be to make early assessments of a child’s language world. Parents, he figured, could use the feedback to intervene and enrich their kids’ verbal environment as needed.
There would appear to be two markets for this — parents with legitimate worries about their kids’ development, and competitive parents looking for any edge they can get to give their children a head start in life. Both sets are wondering the same thing — “What’s really going on in my child’s mind?”
Whether LENA turns out to be an effective early-warning tool or just a source of unnecessary stress (The article points out that “some linguists worry that the technology is more likely to raise false anxieties than to assuage genuine ones,”) it’s a terrific example of a marketer stepping into a conversation the consumer’s already having.
__________________________________________________________________________
Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.
Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.
Like Clutter? You’ll Love Heathrow
If your travels take you through London’s Heathrow Airport, prepare for an onslaught of sales messages, each one competing for ever-smaller slivers of your attention. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, they’re opening a fifth terminal with “more advertising than almost any airport in the world.
The numbers are astounding, especially as they compare with current major US airports:
From giant billboards overlooking security lines to television screens in the underground train station, the ads have been positioned in ways BAA hopes will make them impossible to avoid. There are 333 billboards or posters and 206 flat-screen TV sets, which can change ads to target specific flights. By contrast, Los Angeles International has 34 advertising TV sets in the entire airport and New York’s John F. Kennedy International has 40, according to JCDecaux, a Paris-based specialist in outdoor advertising that was hired to design and sell the new Heathrow ad space to marketers…
Typical Terminal Five visitors will see between 50 and 120 ads, depending on whether they arrive at the airport by car or train and whether they fly domestic or international flights, says Julie France, U.K. managing director of unit J.C. Decaux Airport. That’s at least one ad every two minutes and 55 seconds, based on the two hours and 26 minutes an average traveler spends at Heathrow.
One ad every two minutes and 55 seconds. Our brains aren’t getting any bigger, are they? How are consumers supposed to process all of it? If this idea makes it to our shores, how are advertisers supposed to break through?
__________________________________________________________________________
Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.
Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.