Portland Mattress Store Matches Message to Market

When I consult with local business owners around the country about their advertising, I advise them that their message must be distinctive and meaningful — they need to say something that nobody else in town in saying, and it needs to be of value to their target.

Here’s a great example of this from my hometown of Portland.

Mattress Lot is a small, family-owned mattress retailer on the Northeast side of town. There’s a lot of competition in this category here — multi-location chains such as Sleep Country and Mattress World have large advertising budgets. Going after the mass market, they’ll drown out anything a small operation that Mattress Lot could put out there.

But Mattress Lot has discovered a very interesting niche. Portland has a large, loud, and passionate bicycle community — the kind of community that speaks up, and gets a lot of attention from city government. The kind of community that just might devote its dollars to a local business that speaks its language.

So Mattress Lot is now delivering mattresses by bicycle:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOv4r1NMuZA]

Marketing guru Chris Lytle likes to say that the human mind is a card file, and most consumers only have room for a couple of “cards” in any category. If you’re the fifth place a customer might think of in your category, you’re often out of the running.

Mattress Lot may never be one of the top two cards in the general mattress category. But if they do this right, they have a chance to become the first place a Portland bicyclist thinks of when it’s time to buy a new bed.

They have created a new category, and have a chance to own it.

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Position it Right, and People Will Buy Anything

Does your coffee taste like… dung? There may be a reason. From New York Times comes this news:

Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.

A few thoughts come to mind:

  • I would love to meet the person who first saw what looked like coffee beans in a pile of animal dung and decided to use them to make a drink. Just to ask, “What were you thinking?”
  • No, I mean really. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
  • There’s no way a woman would have done it first. It had to be a guy. Most likely in his late teens or early twenties. Of this I am certain.
  • On second thought, that’s not the guy I want to meet. The guy I want to meet is the person who decided that this is a product he could sell. Just to ask, “How did you arrive at a price?”

And for those in my readership, a question: Have you ever tried this stuff? If, say, Starbucks carried it, would you order a grande?

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The Yellow Pages: An Indirect Obituary

So far this year, I’ve met with 92 companies in seven states. When I meet with a business owner or manager for the first time, there are two questions I always ask when we get around to advertising:

1. What advertising is working best for you these days? I get a variety of answers to this question — sometimes TV, sometimes radio or direct mail, occasionally newspaper.

2. Is there anything you’re doing that’s not working, or that you’re not sure of? To this question, the overwhelming winner — or more accurately, the overwhelming loser — is the Yellow Pages.

For decades, the Yellow Pages was a no-brainer. Everyone had one, everyone used it, and a business simply had to have a major presence there to compete.

No longer. The Internet has replaced the phone book, and the telecommunications companies know it. In New Jersey and New York, Verizon has asked regulators for permission to stop delivering the White Pages to its customers. According to the Newark Star-Ledger:

Telephone books, those once indispensable directories that still land with a thud on every doorstep, may soon be heading the way of the rotary dial.

Verizon, the state’s dominant land line company, is pressing regulators to allow it to stop annual delivery of millions of residential White Pages to its New Jersey customers. The telecommunications firm said it would save 1,400 tons of paper annually by stopping distribution in the state.

It is part of a nationwide effort by phone companies to scale back production of the thick volumes, which, in the digital age, have become increasingly obsolete. Verizon has a similar request before state regulators in New York, while AT&T has already received approval to stop delivering White Pages in states such as Florida and Ohio.

The reason they’re doing this is simple: it costs a lot of money to print and deliver millions of books that nobody ever opens.

They’re still happy to print and deliver the Yellow Pages, though — not because it benefits their customers, but because it still generates revenue for the phone companies and the publishers.

Does it still generate revenue for the advertisers? What we’re hearing around the country is that it doesn’t. An increasing number of long-time Yellow Pages advertisers has drastically cut back or even eliminated their presence without seeing any adverse effects.

There are some exceptions to this: if you’re targeting low-income communities, or rural areas that don’t have reliable broadband access, the Yellow Pages may still be an effective way of reaching customers. And it remains a great source of leads for radio and television salespeople.

But for the vast majority of consumers, the “real” Yellow Pages is now Google.

When’s the last time you opened a phone book?

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Social Media Lesson: Don’t Confuse Response With Results

If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you saw a series of one-word Status Updates. The word was always a color, and there was no explanation in the update:

 “Black”!

 “Tan!”

 “Pink!”

Those among the baffled who Googled the subject learned that people (mostly women) were posting the color of their bras. Days later, it’s still not clear who came up with the idea, or what they were hoping to accomplish — it apparently had something to do with “breast cancer awareness”.

 It’s a great illustration of the difference between response and results.

 There was certainly a response — hundreds of thousands of women took the time to post their bra colors on Facebook. But what was the result?

 The campaign didn’t raise funds for breast cancer research, or services for patients. It didn’t help form support groups, or lobby for government support, or cause women to get mammograms. It didn’t even increase “breast cancer awareness” — nobody learned anything new about the disease.

 Response, yes. Results, no.

 For a look at a social media campaign that got real results, read this article about Jonathan Marcus, an assistant track coach at Portland’s Roosevelt High School. Marcus was appalled that many local track athletes couldn’t afford running shoes or other essential gear for their sport.

In mid-December, Marcus and his friend Jacob Buckmaster, an assistant track coach at Roosevelt, decided to take a different approach to outfitting athletes. Tapping into the local running community on the Internet through Facebook, they appealed for donations.

“We just figured we were going to get used or gently worn clothing,” Marcus said. “Initially, it was a clothing drive. But then it just started to take wings.”

Donations came from everywhere. Nike gave 40 pairs of shoes and new clothing. Road Runner Sports in Tualatin, where Marcus is a “grassroots partner,” contributed 30 pairs of slightly used shoes. Adidas on Thursday donated 14 pairs of new running shoes and 217 articles of new clothing. And Fit Right Northwest, with stores in Northwest Portland and Vancouver, came through with more than 200 pairs of shoes and about 100 garments — roughly $15,000 worth of merchandise.

Unlike whoever came up with the “What Color is Your Bra” idea, Marcus and Buckmaster knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish, and used Facebook to accomplish the goal. They asked their target audience to take a specific action, and were able to measure the results: to date, about 360 pairs of shoes and 700 articles of clothing.

To paraphrase advertising legend David Olgilvy,

Response is “I like your ad.”

Results is “I bought the product.”
 

Which would you prefer?

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The Portable People Meter: One Man Beats the System

Arbitron, the ratings service that measures radio listening, recently launched — with great fanfare — a new device called the Portable People Meter (PPM). Before PPM, Arbitron used a diary system in which survey participants were supposed to write down the stations they listened to.

The accuracy of this system depended on the accuracy of the subjects’ memories.

Which meant that the ratings, to put it mildly, were not terribly accurate. Many people filled in their diaries well after they had listened to the radio, and didn’t remember all the stations they’d been exposed to. Others filled in what they thought they should have listened to, rather than what they actually had on.

The Portable People, a device that partipants carry, records an encoded signal. If a participant is within range of the signal, the device picks it up. So memory and opinion are no longer factors. This is meant to be a significant improvement, and maybe it is.

But it ain’t perfect, as blogger Jerry Del Colliano reports:

 A friend of one of my readers is a People Meter family. The woman of the house carries her meter with her.

Her husband — well, how can I put this?

…he attaches it to his dog and his dog wanders wherever it wants and some fool at a radio station thinks the man of the house likes Oldies 101 when it is actually the dog. And an even bigger fool — advertisers — are accepting hearing (as in somewhere near an encoded signal) instead of listening (as in fans of the radio station).

While I’ll admit the Doggie Meter is likely an aberration, it dramatically demonstrates that man’s best friend is not a People Meter unless it is understood for both its advantages and limitations.

The lesson here? Raw numbers by themselves won’t tell you where, or how, to advertise. If your message was bringing in customers before the diary-to-meter switch, it will still bring in customers, even if the station you’re using has dropped in the rankings. And if you didn’t belong on a station before, you don’t suddenly belong on it now that it’s jumped nine spots on a ranker.

Listener behavior hasn’t changed — only the way it’s measured. And the measuring device just might be on a dog.

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, America’s Attention-Rental Expert, at 503-477-4933.