Category: Uncategorized

Trying to Sell Without Selling

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article about Unilever’s efforts to promote Axe deodorant by producing a television series called “The Gamekillers”. It details the sometimes contentious negotiations between Unilever — who wanted to make sure that viewers got the connection between the program and Axe — and MTV, who feared that an explicit connection would turn viewers off.

The end result was an entertaining show that may or may not have contributed to Unilever’s bottom line. Axe sales increased 60% in 2006, so obviously Unilever did something right. But without any response mechanism besides a Gamekillers Myspace page, how do you measure the results?

My white paper, “The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them” is still available at no charge. It neither recommends nor opposes creating your own television series, although right now I’m leaning against the idea. Click to download your copy

The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes

I recently completed a 13-page 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.

Among the subjects I cover are:

Why trying to reach the largest possible audience can actually hurt your results.

What your prospects are really interested in (hint: it’s not you),

How many topics you should cover in each ad

The one item that must be in your advertising if you want to generate results

Why you should stop agonizing about reaching “The Right People” — and what you should concentrate on instead.

Why you may be leaving money on the table even if your marketing generates new customers.

You can download a copy of this report at no charge by signing up here.

Tips for Creating Loyalty

Although I subscribe to Business Week, I somehow missed this article on creating and maintaining loyal customers. The folks at Church of the Customer Blog caught it and provided the link.Their original post appears here.

To me, the most powerful tip had to do with some of the things we’re tempted to do in order to sneak a few extra profits:

Don’t treat your customers as if they were expendable. Companies that break the Golden Rule by misleading, coercing, and disrespecting their customers effectively turn them into detractors. Examples in today’s world are countless, but they include nuisance fees and hidden charges, poor in-store service, and dreaded automated customer help lines. Such mistreatment causes customers to switch to competitors, cut back on their purchases, and, worst of all, warn others to stay away from the company.

My favorite recent example was the “spa use fee” that two different Scottdsale hotels saw fit to add to my bill at a conference. $15 a night in one, $13 a night in the other. In their “defense”, it was in the fine print in my reservation after I booked it. But geez, guys, if you’d told me it was $154 a night I would have paid without complaint. Telling me it’s $139 and then sticking me is dirty pool.