Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category

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Anger At Root of Staples Easy Button Campaign

Friday, April 20th, 2012

The Staples ad campaign offers an Easy button. Another campaign depicts the frustration of trying to pry a CD from its packaging. I’m not sure it’s that everything has gradually become more difficult. I think it’s that everything we’ve been led to believe is easy to use and would make our lives smoother and easier has failed to do so. We’re all angry about it. But it’s a subconscious form of anger that accumulates in a subtle way from every direction. It’s as if these day to day experiences with nasty customer service, poor product quality and arrogant attitudes can be tolerated individually when each one is isolated as a minor, one-time occurrence.

Staples Easy Button ad campaign

Easy button campaign tapped frustration with useless customer service, poor product quality.

But over time, we have little choice but to boil over. That’s why I scrapped my DirecWay Internet service and had my home and office wired for cable.

It had only been about a year since I was gleefully praising the DirecWay customer service team and how quickly their installer arrived. They clearly wanted my business. “Take

that, Comcast and all your service outages!” I remember thinking. But DirecWay just didn’t work. I don’t mean it just didn’t work out. I mean it failed to operate. The modem died twice during the year and we were stuck with at least a dozen service outages that lasted anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unacceptable. Snow on the dish. Ice on the dish. Rain water in the dish. Even a hornet’s nest on the dish blocked service. Not once was the tech support team in the overseas call center able to restore my connection. Their best effort was always to request a service call from an area installer who is supposed to call within 3-5 days – “but I should call them back if I haven’t heard from them in that time.” Only once of the eight or nine times did the installer call within the 3-5 days.

I’m still surprised that any company could make the cable company look good. I had one of the first high speed cable connections years ago and though it was fast, it was plagued with outage after outage.

The root of our frustration is that things just don’t work. They’re supposed to work. But they don’t. DirecWay’s ad campaign pushed the speed of the connection but who cares how fast a page could load if there is no connection? My first DVD player worked for a few months. Then it didn’t. An early digital camera worked very well for 10 months. Then it didn’t. My combination scanner/printer/color copier worked very well for about six months. Then it didn’t.  And I had to get a new scanner and printer, which I’d been trying to avoid in the first place.

Product designers are scrambling to pack everything full of bells and whistles to get consumers excited. What they really need to do is focus on the problem their devices are supposed to be solving and solve them. Bells and whistles don’t matter if the sound card doesn’t work.

This process equipment ad effectively taps the same frustration.

Posted in advertising, marketing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Lowe’s Boycott a Lesson in Media Planning

Monday, December 19th, 2011

This controversy would've been quite predictable for an experienced media planner. Did Lowe's failure at media planning cause this fracas?

Media planning – not crisis communications? Sure, some PR person will soon write up a case study declaring what the Lowe’s PR team did wrong amid the uproar over the company’s decision to pull its advertising from the TV show All-American Muslim. To summarize, Muslim groups have organized a boycott of Lowe’s as punishment for responding to the demand from a Christian group that the company pull its advertising from the show. I drove by a Lowe’s in Pennsylvania yesterday, btw, and saw no protesters (and few customers).

Yet the fatal failure in this fiasco falls not upon the crisis PR response but upon the media planning. If the case for advertising on the show was sound and advanced the interests of the shareholders then at least have the courage to stand by the decision when asked to pull the advertising. Instead, it appears Lowe’s caved pretty quickly, likely for fear of a boycott.

If it wasn’t a sound decision then the media planning failed and invited the costly controversy. Oh, what little care and consideration seems to be spent in deciding where to advertise!  It’s unfortunate that in many ad agencies and in-house marketing departments, media recommendations are entrusted to novices who lack the wisdom and experience to understand the ramifications of where their advertising dollars are placed. In fact, it’s scary to think how many people at Lowe’s with marketing and advertising job titles either never anticipated this situation, or worse, decided not to speak up for fear of appearing less than politically correct.

There is more to smart media planning than just numerical ratings, circulation and impressions. The mere act of supporting a show or publication suggests support for the content regardless of the organization’s actual positions, if any. Media planners bear a great responsibility to everyone in an organization that goes beyond delivering the ad message to the right people at the right time at the right place at the lowest cost. If this boycott grows legs and actually hurts Lowe’s then stores may be closed and good people put out of work. That’s the extended impact of media planning that needs to be carefully considered before media plans are approved and ad space is placed.

For anyone experienced in media planning, the backlash should’ve been completely predictable.

 

 

 

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Superior Design Gets Prospects Ready

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Superior architecture like Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water achieves a desired result, such as a house that makes guests feel comfortably right at home or a doctor’s office that makes patients feel…patient – without the guests or patients truly knowing exactly why they feel comfortable and patient. Superior graphic design affects prospects in a similar way and influences their decision to buy.

After a few months of reading about architecture and a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, I happened upon a manufacturer’s spec sheet and it occurred to me that the art of building design is very much like the art of graphic design. Architects consider how to create a mood from outside the building, then guide people inside and direct the traffic flow to suit the purpose of the building. At Falling Water, for example, many of the ceilings become progressively lower moving from each room’s doorway towards the windows, always guiding the eye outside to striking views of the waterfall.

Superior architecture achieves a desired result, such as a building that appears as a natural part of its environment, or a house that makes guests feel comfortably right at home or a doctor’s office that makes patients feel…patient – without the guests or patients truly knowing exactly why they feel comfortable and patient.

Likewise, superior graphic design creates a mood upon first glance then guides the eye from one place to another, directing the flow to suit the purpose of the literature, ad, sign, Web page, direct mailer or other material. Superior graphic design invites people to read the copy and gives them permission to absorb and be influenced by the message. It helps achieve a desired result, such as converting a reader into a lead or a lead into a customer.

We see scores of examples of architecture and design every day but don’t often realize the full extent of their influence. How we feel inside an office, for example or how much we spend in a retail store are influenced by the strength of their designs. Whether we read a spec sheet or direct mailer and take action or discard them to the trash is also influenced by the strength of their designs. We don’t always recognize superior graphic design until we see examples that don’t measure up, which is what sparked this post.

In looking for examples worth emulating, I gathered 12 of my favorite examples of superior graphic design in one place. Click here to see all twelve:

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Posted in advertising, Design, marketing | No Comments »

So Much Focus on the Medium, Don’t Forget the Message

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Many marketing professionals obsess about finding the ideal mix of advertising, direct mail, publicity, social media, email, TV and other media – the “media mix” per advertising textbooks. Certainly, it’s effective to use several different channels but many of these marketers seem so focused on the medium and the ratio that they forget about the message – they forget the reason for all of their pondering, theorizing and calculating is to deliver a sales message.

When faced with lackluster response they conclude, “advertising doesn’t work,” or “direct mail doesn’t work, we tried that.” “Next time, we’ll focus a higher percentage on publicity,” for example. It’s easier to blame low response on the decline of print media readership, the use of email spam filters or on the consumers’ short attention spans than it is to blame the strength (or weakness) of the message.

If the case for the product/service is so strong that it’s worth manufacturing and/or selling then maybe it wasn’t presented or described as effectively as it could have been. Maybe the message wasn’t integrated or leveraged effectively across the multiple channels. Many marketers overlook that a wide variety of different factors beyond the media mix affect the response rate and that the method of message delivery is but one of these factors, despite the disproportionate amount of attention it’s often given. Consider these other factors:

  • Does the product/service meet a need?
  • Does the message clearly solve that need?
  • Does the visual design capture attention and support delivery of the sales message?
  • Does the copywriting hold attention and lead to a response?
  • Is the message being delivered to the right audience?

Imagine a financial planner obsessing about the ideal asset allocation ratio among stocks, bonds and cash. It isn’t enough to conclude that 50 percent of assets need to be in stocks. To be successful, the planner needs to know in which stocks. For marketers, it isn’t enough to conclude that the budget needs to be allocated among different channels by a given ratio. There’s more to it than that. Marketing success demands the right message is delivered to the right audience with the right presentation at the right time. And that’s true whether the message is delivered by advertising, direct mail, publicity or any other channel.

How to determine the ideal media mix to follow in a separate post.

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Posted in advertising, marketing, PR | 3 Comments »

Readership Down: Dumbing Down Speeds Media’s Demise

Friday, May 27th, 2011
epr Marketing Blog post on dumbing down business media

As business media dumbs down its content, it turns away readers and its advertisers quickly follow. Thanks to the unknown artist who designed this maze.

I was flipping through New Jersey Business yesterday and found an article offering Internet marketing tips from a Web developer I’ve known for many years. Looking forward to reading some pearls of wisdom, I quickly grew frustrated that a guy I knew to be quite knowledgeable had obviously been asked to provide a basic overview of simple tips that would be useful to the uninitiated. It occurred to me that this exemplifies why print readership continues to plummet along with its ad revenues. When it comes to business owners and the Internet, very few people are still in the uninitiated camp and simply feeding dumbed-down versions of otherwise useful information nullifies any potential value. It becomes uninteresting and readers become less eager to open the magazine when the next issue arrives in the mail, convinced that nothing of value is inside.

This type of basic information is already available online, by email and by other e-vehicles for free. Nearly any business professional who is a member of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association (NJBIA) and therefore a New Jersey Business recipient already knows the basics of the Internet. They know about social media. They’re ready to read something with more depth and this author would’ve been able to provide it in clear terms that any business person could understand.

If print magazines, newspapers, and any publisher for that matter – print or online – want to be relevant, their editorial departments need to continuously provide useful information that actually helps their readers. Rather than dumbing down their information, I’d suggest they ramp it up with details and insights and challenge their readers to think, to learn and even to reflect or take action after finishing an article. That’s how a loyal readership is developed. And a loyal readership attracts ad revenue.

Posted in advertising, content | 7 Comments »

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