Unsolicited Marketing Advice

Many people seem to think that advertising is a company's "powerhouse" strategy, while public relations is "fluff." Like many commonly held perceptions, this one between 90 and 180 degrees wrong. To support the assertion that PR is NOT fluff, we call to the stand an expert witness, and a marketer's marketer:

Featured Marketing Expert: Philip Kotler

• S.C. Johnson and Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University)
• "The most influential marketer of all time" (American Marketing Association)
• "First, he has done more than any other writer or scholar to promote the importance of marketing" (Morgan Witzel, Financial Times)
• Prolific marketing author (Amazon link)
• Classic Text: Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control (12th edition)

The Testimony
And what does this marketing expert have to say about the role of public relations?

"The major challenge today is getting people's attention. Consumers are pressed or time, and many work hard to avoid advertising messages. The main challenge is to find new ways to capture attention and position a brand in the consumer's mind. Public relations and word-of-mouth marketing are playing a growing role within the marketing mix to build and maintain brands."

So what marketing strategies should today's companies be emphasizing, according to Mr. Kotler?

"For example, I feel that advertising is overdone and public relations is underdone. This is seconded in Al Ries's book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. And direct marketing tools are also rising in importance in the marketing mix."

Source: MarketingProfs.com (subscription required for archives)

The Bottom Line
While it may come as a surprise to many novices, most marketers -- especially in the non-profit realm -- will readily agree that Public Relations is likely the most effective tool in the marketing arsenal for promoting a wide range of services. Here is a small chart explaining why PR carries a hidden punch:

Comparison of Advertising and PR on Four Dimensions

	Advertising	Public Relations
Permission based	No	Yes
Credibility	Generally Low	Generally High
Amplifies Word of Mouth	Sometimes	Often
Supports Information-Seeking Behavior	Sometimes	Often

Technorati Tags: Public Relations, Word of Mouth, Permission Marketing, Philip Kotler.

Labels: Public Relations

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:15 PM | Permalink | |

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While many think of naming as a wild and creative effort, good naming is actually a surprisingly structured process. Yes, it is creative, but the creativity is channeled in strategic directions, and then balanced and modified by thoughtful analysis. Here are some additional resources to investigate if you have something to name:

• J.D. Moore at Marketing Comet offers offers 10 tips to keep in mind when naming your business. He espouses practical names for small businesses and warns of the dangers of artificial, constructed names, despite their success in the Internet areana.
• Articles on naming and branding of businesses from namingtoolbox.com
• Articles on naming from Strategic Name Development of Minneapolis, MN (Also has an interesting blog on naming and branding )
• The Visual Thesaurus can help you brandstorm word associations
• Idea Center brainstorming software (formerly IdeaFisher)
• Steps involved in developing a new name used by Namestormers (lead by Mike Carr, former president of Salinon Corporation)
• Naming Process used by Lexicon provides insights into the structured approach, tools and research methodology used by professional naming agencies.
• Namebase is creative firm that helped name products for Fruitopia, IBM, Cannon, Tropicana and other well-known firms. This site exudes excitement and is worth visiting just to catch this emotion.
• Master-McNeil is big name, button-down agency in naming. Created "PayPal," "We" (Women's Entertainment channel), Nestle's "Country Creamery" ice cream, and others you've never heard of. Has an interesting archive of news stories about branding in which their staff have been quoted, including one about how Enron was originally named Enteron, a word that also means a tract through which the human body digests food and disposes of leftovers.

Technorati Tags: Branding

Labels: Branding

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:15 AM | Permalink | |

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I’ve always disliked the overuse of explanation points. Perhaps I just don’t like people shouting at me. More likely it’s because the writer is most likely emphasizing something that’s important to them, but not to me. Regardless, I’ve finally found a statistic for how often they should be used in copywriting! Elmore Leonard recommends using exclamation points no more frequently than two or three times per 100,000 words. That sounds about right.

Technorati Tags: Copywriting

Labels: Copy Writing

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 9:00 PM | Permalink | |

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A great Web site is no good if your visitors can't easily contact you to continue the dialog. One step in ensuring visitor become customers (or donors) is having clear calls to action on your key Web pages. Another is making sure you have an excellent method for closing the feedback loop through a "contact us" feature.

Beyond Basic E-mail
The easiest method for feedback is to pop an e-mail address on each Web page. Unfortunately, this isn't particularly helpful. Staff handling this inbox will quickly become swamped with Spam as a result of e-mail address harvesting robots that scour the Internet looking for new list fodder. Plus, those writing you will have to enter a subject line and explain the full details and context of their question or request. This puts an added burden of inconvenience on the dialog that you want to establish. Therefore, the first rule for a good contact feature is to mask your organization's e-mail addresses while at the same time making the conversation easier for the visitor. This usually involves developing of some type of Web form.

Be Contextual
If you have a large organization, you likely have a large Web site with different pages for individual products, services, departments or divisions. In these cases, it makes sense to facilitate each area getting their respective inquiries. Furthermore, one can help put inquires into context for the receiving department by sending information about the page that the user was on when the contact feature was invoked. This can take the form of the URL or other hint embedded into the message sent to the appropriate department, or particular wording about the request built into the e-mail's subject heading.

Be Convenient
Use of check boxes, radio buttons, drop-down boxes and easy to fill-in dialog boxes can help your visitors quickly navigate through a contact form. Plus, contact forms should be broken into more than one step if it makes the process flow better for the user. Users will understand and appreciate when they make a selection off of, say, a drop down box and the page refreshes to then ask relevant information for that specific request.

Be Relational
One of the most common errors in designing a contact feature is using a Web form that asks for every imaginable piece of information about the person making the inquiry. If your correspondence is going to be via e-mail, then it's rude to ask for postal address. If gender or age isn't relevant to the inquiry, then it's rude to ask for them. It's even ruder when these elements are made required fields. Sure, marketers want every last shred of information on a customer, but hopefully if that same marketer was a man, he wouldn't ask for every shred of information about a woman on their first date. In the same way, it is best to avoid over-asking on a first inquiry. A better approach is to ask for the appropriate information for the request at hand, and then let the database on the individual build over time. When the request involves mailing a piece, collect the postal address; when you're offering a personalized response, give the customer a choice of e-mail or phone (and ask the most convenient time to call); when you have versions of a product for males and females, ask for gender. Plus, if you can pre-fill contact information for subsequent inquiries through a permission-based "remember me" cookie, the result will be more personal and convenient for the user.

Be Flexible
"Contact us" is often the "bail out" feature when a user can't find what they want on your web site. This is all too common because of design limitations or the common difficulty of building effective site search. But one can't assume that users want to start an e-mail dialog with you as a result of clicking "contact us." Sometimes they're just looking for a phone number, a fax number or a postal address. Your contact forms should offer these options up front, even before offering a convenient Web form. Integrating these phone and mail options with Web form will help continue the immediacy of the conversation. If you can offer live chat or voice-over IP as an option, so much the better for promptly addressing your customer's needs.

Build for the Future
If you take the time to build a contact feature correctly, it will appear simple to the user, but yet have an elegant back-end complexity. After all this effort, you'll want to be able to easily add additional request forms as your products and services expand. Plus, you'll need easy access to update phone numbers or other contact information on individual Web forms. An administrative function should allow the webmaster or mistress to easily develop additional contact forms and place them anywhere on your site.

Examples

The following screenshots show examples of the contact features on Dow Corning's web site at www.dowcorning.com. Explanatory comments are in italic below each image. (Click on the images to see a larger view) :

Resources for Building a Web Site Contact Feature

• structure:interactive, designer of "contact us" modules that plug into content management systems, among their other talents
• useit.com, Jakob Neilsen offers general usability tips regarding a company's "About Us" pages

Technorati Tags: Web design

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:30 AM | Permalink | |

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Of all the clippings stashed away in binders in my office, my favorite is a 1997 one by the late Ray Jutkins regarding the use of postscripts in direct mail. Ray’s key point:

Research has shown that 79 percent of people who open your direct mail will read the P.S. first.

If you didn’t catch that, he restates it clearly: “4 of 5 of your readers will read the P.S. first...before they read anything else in your letter.” That makes the lowly postscript a mandatory for every direct mail letter. Jutkins further explains that the postscript shouldn’t be a new idea, but rather be supported elsewhere in the text of the letter. The postscript can:

• Be hard or soft sell
• Remind of premium, gift or guarantee
• Suggest an action
• Repeat your key benefits, last call to action, or phone number
• Reinforce your offer with one or two points
• Summarize your sales message

If one P.S. is good, don’t rule out another. According to Jutkins, “When you have 2 key thoughts that need repeating or emphasis - there is no better way than with a P.S. and a P.P.S.” Ray’s two books, Magic Marketing Minutes and Power Direct Marketing are available for reading online.

Technorati Tags: Direct Mail

Labels: Direct Mail

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 6:45 AM | Permalink | |

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Here are a few selections to help you make better use of that new video iPod this Thursday. (Don’t have an iPod? No problem. You can still watch these on your computer, it’s just not quite as much fun).

Why We Fight
Created by Frank Capra for the War Department, this classic series of World War II propaganda documentaries is often a mandatory part of entry-level Journalism or PR courses. If you missed these, or slept through them, you can watch them again with more appreciation. (Download from Archive.org, length varies by episode, various formats available)

Seth Godin Speaks at Google
The author of All Marketers are Liars and other popular titles discusses his views of marketing as part of the Google Author Series (Download from Google Video, 48 min., various formats available).

The Search by John Battelle
Founder of Wired Magazine, author of The Search, and brand manager of Boing Boing, Battelle presents the history of search to an audience of Google employees in NYC as part of the Google Author Series (Download from Google Video, 57 min., various formats available). Flickr photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc. and MediaLive International.

Medical Quackery Public Service Announcement
This short PSA from the FDA targeted senior citizens of the 1950s, warning them of the false claims of Z-rays, cancer cures and nutritional supplements. (Download from archive.org, 1 min., various formats available). If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by e-mail or RSS.
© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:10 AM | Permalink | |

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Ruining Trust through High Pressure Marketing
I really like my Discover Card credit card: well accepted, no fee, cash back, online account access, virtual shopping numbers. It’s great. But they’re starting to upset me because of their questionable direct mail tactics.

Repeatedly I’ve received mailings, somewhat smaller than a statement in size that say “Important Information Enclosed.” No, there really isn’t any “important information” enclosed by any reasonable definition. Instead, it is a sales pitch from Discover Financial Services Chairman & CEO David Nelms to transfer my higher-rate credit card balances to Discover using preprinted checks they’ve enclosed.

Discover Card is risking their reputation by tricking me into opening their envelope with the “Important Information” ploy. True, it might be “important” to them, and it might even be “interesting” to some poor slob who is overextended on his other cards, but there is no way they can claim it is universally important to both of us in the same way that the credit card billing that it is meant to impersonate would be. More recently, I’ve started to receive similar mailings that I presume are a test against this control. Now, in addition to “Important information” the envelope says “Dated Material. Open Immediately.” So, is this type of envelope wording a lie? I think so, and that’s all it takes for me to lower my overall esteem for the company.

But there’s more. I’m continuously receiving pre-printed checks from Discover Card so I can have a new way to charge things to my credit card. I read the fine print of these checks once and decided that, like cash advances, they weren’t a particularly wise way to use my credit card. So, I have now have no desire for these checks. I could always ask for them if I wanted them, but worse, they make me nervous. Thus, I always go to the extra effort of shredding the checks or throwing them in the fireplace. But that’s extra work, and I’d rather have my credit card company saving me time and effort.

The bottom line is that Discover Card, like many other companies, needs to get a clue regarding relationships and reputation management. It’s not all about sales or marketing. Research into how customers are reacting to these tactics would be one good approach to consider. More creativity in the marketing division, including a greater partnership with the public relations staff could also be an effective approach that the company should consider.

(Oh, and yes, I wrote David Nelms, but haven't received a response yet.)

Technorati Tags: Direct Mail

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:00 AM | Permalink | |

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