Manhattan Marketing Maven

Labor Day Marketing Lessons

As we grasp the last few days of the summer holidays, here are a few random observations about marketing and advertising ...

Own Your Positioning. Along with the French, I love Jerry Lewis. The schmaltz, the cheesiness, the has-been performers singing long-forgotten big-band songs, the B rolls of guys in white coats holding test tubes, the drum rolls and the tote boards heralded by the wrinkling and shrinking  Ed McMahon, the lame local anchors and the tear-wrenching appeals all signal Labor Day to me. I imagine a great national catharsis focuses on Jerry and his kids as I participate in the morbid health-watch to see which diseases and which side effects of treatments Jerry himself will display each year. Jerry and MDA have staked out a position and for 30+ years they have delivered on it and raised zillions to fight muscular diseases. There's nothing better and nothing more reliable and nothing more comforting than watching Jerry and his shtick on the Love Network at random moments during the Labor Day weekend. So don't just sit there -- dial the number on your screen and help Jerry!

Familiarity/Personalization Counts. The coffee guy at the corner of Broadway and West 35th Street sees me coming and prepares my iced coffee exactly the way I like it. He gives fast, convenient service, swiftly delivers my preferred product and makes me feel part of something much bigger than myself. Its a lesson every local candy store owner, newspaper vendor and butcher knows instinctively and one which thousands of firms struggle to incorporate into their culture and deliver using technology. In a whizzing, whirring confusing world being recognized and remembered cuts through the clutter and builds brand loyalty and repeat business.

Visuals Set Expectations. The ballet slipper shoe craze has been in full force for almost two years. The simple unstructured flats have gone from the barre to the barrio and everywhere in between. The form and design communicate simplicity, elegance and grace. I guess women have embraced them because they feel good and make your feet look smaller. That is until I saw a hot but clod-like woman bouncing down the subway steps feet splayed wearing these shoes. Watching Dumbo in ballet slippers was a great example of using visuals to set expectations and connotations yet when the experience cross-cut the expectation it made me laugh. The lesson -- if you set expectations with visuals the experience has to deliver on the expectation to build or maintain credibility.   

Recognize Rhythms. Our bodies are driven by circadian rhythms and our lives are shaped by calendars and practical and operational rhythms. Sometimes a great idea can cut across them but usually its much harder to swim against the tide. We're finishing up "Back to School" soon the stores will bring out the black and orange/gold Fall/Halloween decorations, our Fall semester of community, educational, cultural and performing events is gearing up. Much of the advertising and marketing we see are cliches tagged onto these cycles. But the underlying idea is that intersecting with the expected and aligning with the anticipated usually gets you faster more efficient access to markets, prospects and customers that trying to cross cut underlying patterns. This is not a prescription for sameness or for routine but a recognition that we need to order and structure our time and our resources and that marketing that aligns and resonates with this process generally works better.

Happy Labor Day.   

We're Watching More TV Happily

If you have a digital video recorder (DVR) you are probably watching more TV than before in less time and are happier about it because you are only seeing the stuff you like best and fast forwarding through the commercials. That's the implication of a new global study done by the IBM Institute for Business Value. which is summarized on MarketingCharts.com.

The study of 885 US and 1515 households in other countries found that 24% of American respondents have a DVR and half of them watch TV recorded TV programming on them. Two-thirds watch 1-4 hours of TV daily and one-third report watching more TV since acquiring their recording device. For Drew McClellan this suggests that DVR ownership reverses the downward trends on TV consumption (versus interactive media).

DVRs allow peple to watch their favorite shows whenever they want and to sample new shows without having to plant themselves in front of the tube at a particular time. They enable viewers to create their own content marathons, follow their favorite teams and manage their time and their media choices as they see fit. 

This makes TV programmers and advertisers crazy because all those highly creativite and expensely produced spots featuring big name talent get zapped. According to Tivo's Stop//Watch Analysis, reported by Burt Helm in Businessweek, direct marketing ads and ads with a straightforward direct offer or appeal are the least fast forwarded spots recorded.

The common theme? If its relevant to the viewer they watch it.

Lesson for marketers: Know your audience. Create and distribute relevant messages contextually.

Marketing Lessons from the Hospital

Every profession has a dedicated language; those words, terms, phrases and concepts that serve as both a short-hand for practitioners and as a filter to keep outsiders at bay. In most cases these vocabularies are created or policed by professional bodies much like the medieval guilds protected the trade secrets and prerogatives of their members.

The best example of this can be found in any hospital where the medical argot is a mix of Latin, tech terms and centuries of practice, study and innovation. Doctor's language is a great wall of China for patients and their families; a barrier that instills fear and confusion as it fosters dependency which is further complicated by the methodology of medical practice driven by hospital's need and third-party insurers needs for efficiency, economies of scale, brad building and repeat business.

A visit to anyone in the hospital offers several clear directives to marketers:

1. Expose the Process. Everyone needs to understand the basic rules of the game. In the hospital you are on your own. Doctors, specialists, nurses, students, aides and schelpers of many stripes traipse into the room and do stuff. The plan, the sequence and the goals are rarely understandable or clear and nobody is incented to tell you. Finding out what is wrong with the patient, who is managing it, what are the issues and considerations and what is going to happen next is much harder than the most complicated video game and more frustrating than the best mystery novel.

2. Loose the Lingo. In real life most people get it and most things can be explained simply or by analogy. Consumers and patients aren't as dumb as we look. The professional nomenclature which marks guild membership is a turn-off and a barrier to effective care, especially in cases where the patient's family or friends need to give the medical team data, context or information. Without understanding what's going on and what the doctors are thinking about, patients and their loved ones edit the data they share which in turn can complicate or frustrate effective treatment. This holds true across many service businesses where professional ego and distance creates an unnecessary and counterproductive adversarial situation..

3. Consider Context. Every message to a human brain is processed through the state-of-mind filter. The hospital, by its nature, is a scary and disease filled place. Anxiety is ubiquitous. Add the scary visual of a loved one confined to a bed, near naked and uncomfortably hooked up to honking and beeping machines and your target customer is lost in a sci-fi world. You must factor in the emotional context of your target audience since all medical and stressful communication has to start with the understanding that the audience is disoriented, fearful, ignorant and anxious. Too often the medical professionals cool, professional and familiar context rather than the patient/family context drives the message and the communications style.    

4. Get Real. Humans are physically and emotionally sturdy. Evolution has wired us to nimbly handle threats and to instinctively process information. There is little or no point in withholding information or attempting to guild the lily, especially to people supporting patients with chronic or persistent ailments.Nobody thinks medicine is a precise science. Everyone understands that there are multiple variables at play. But few of us have the patience to slog through dis-information or the knowledge to piece together the real story from fragments and snippets of data and opinion parsed through a large and unknown cast of characters.

5. Tackle the Topline. Take charge of the communications burden and tell customers or patients the topline. You have the affirmative, proactive communications burden. It's not okay to hide, duck or wait till the customer or patient is red-faced, screaming or homicidal before sharing information. Everyone needs to understand where they are, what is happening next and what are the possible outcomes of the game. This is true if you are selling socs online, undertaking an eLearning exercise or supporting a chronically ill relative.

Facebook's March on Madison Avenue

Facebook has launched a public relations initiative to capture attention, profiles and dollars from Madison Avenue and to make inroads against MySpace and LinkedIn.

Out of the blue there has been a stream of press touting Facebook. First we get the news that older and richer people have jumped aboard the community that heretofore was used to identify who the hot freshmen were. Then comes a funny piece in Monday's Ad Age by Matthew Creamer who breathlessly tells us where to get the goods on Stuart Elliot, advertising columnist of the New York Times, David Kenney, CEO of Digitas, the controversial ad strumpet and former Wal*Mart marketing vixen Julie Roehm and others. 

Does anyone else see the hand of a skilled publicist at work here?

Facebook is a community originally populated by and restricted to college kids. In the search for an evolving business model and greater ad revenues, it has been opened up and has become directly competitive for consumer marketing cash and dedicated campaigns with MySpace. Now evidently, they think that enrolling ad guys will not only blunt the competition's lead but improve the demographics and  loosen a few purse strings.

All this attention comes slightly ahead of the annual Fall budgeting season and the annual fourth quarter "use-it-or-lose-it" spending spree. While many marketers suspect that these online communities have value and utility for B2C and maybe even B2B brands, few know exactly how. And even fewer understand how to use these communities and leverage the sensibilities of their members to create demand, move product or even effectively solicit data. There has been a lot of press about brands mounting communities using social networks. But there is very little data or evidence of how these campaigns fared. In most cases awareness, vaguely defined or measured, and first-mover bragging rights seems to have been the prize.

Ironically while Facebook is flogging itself to the press, DraftFCB digital leader Bradley Kay is arguing that online communities should  be smaller and more exclusive rather than open to anybody. Arguing that smaller, tighter better defined segments are more useful for marketers than mass communities he calls for creating micro-communities that are "different but not too different." In his opinion, the value of these digital connections is dramatically enhanced by targeting specific audiences, filtering membership candidates against selection criteria, limiting access and granting members the right to invite outsiders into the exclusive club. Who knows? Maybe a micro-community of clueless ad guys will invest their clients' marketing dollars in Facebook faster.

Susan Mernit calling Facebook and other communities "fads of the moment" points out that Facebook and like communities appeal to psychological needs for attention, connection and recognition, all qualities in reasonably short supply among marketers and advertisers. To her way of thinking the voyeuristic aspect of these communities coupled with the propensity to sign-up real and imagined "friends" are just our neuroses in search of a digital home.

There is clearly something to Facebook and its competitors. And they are clearly working it to convince others that its not just a bunch of kids listing their favorite music, linking themselves to hotties and describing their eating, sleeping or drinking habits -- many of which will prejudice employers against them.

I salute the effort to stir the pot and penetrate the circles that drive spending and set the agenda. But in my mind Facebook is still a potential tool in search of an application.   

Searching for Santa & Holiday eCommerce Success

While Christmas seems far off, savvy marketers are lining up their holiday merchandise, offers, promotions, landing pages, infrastructure and planning their campaigns right now. Enter ChannelAdvisor Search with a scarily illuminating white paper titled "Seven Steps to Holiday Search Success."

These North Carolina-based software and ecommerce services guys argue that you have to think long and  hard in advance to optimize holiday search since every Nimrod and his brother jumps in Q4 creating a phenomenon they call the "CPC Wave" -- which artificially spikes the costs and muddies the waters. Just when you thought you had retail ecommerce search figured out and bench-marked, you have to rethink and retool your program. But actually its the good news.

In figuring out a holiday search strategy you are trying to extract the best fish from the ocean at the right time without overspending. Its a daunting objective since traffic and shopping grows steadily from Halloween through New Year's Day. You don't want to double pay for over-pay for business you'd get anyway. But you do want to separate the active buyers from the tire-kickers, harvest more-than-your-fair share on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. get maximum impact for offers like free shipping and use "last ship day for Xmas" and other urgency messages to create optimal revenues. And you are doing this at exactly the same time everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.

Planning are parsing are critical. Use historical data to figure out when you need to pour it on and when you can afford to coast. Similarly you need to re-craft keywords to zero-in on how buyers actually search and buy rather than shoot your wad attracting people who are checking out the merchandise or researching alternatives.This can be tricky since you need to buy not only specific product and model names you also need to embed offers, obvious misspellings and broader category terms into your keyword phrases.Then you need to figure out how to ride the predictable waves, how to watch this whole program like a hawk between Thanksgiving and December 20 and know when to throttle back as shoppers automatically go into post-holiday sale mode.

And its not just about buying words. In addition to aligning with inventory availability and discount cycles, the program should involve multi-dimensional messaging, dedicated landing pages, optimization models and some quick and reliable way to measure what you are doing and spending so you can adjust on the fly and take advantage of timing, news, weather or unforeseen developments. Are you tired and anxious yet, even though its just the dog days of August?

If you're thinking "oh, brother nothing's easy" ...you're right. But if you're not thinking about using what you know and what you can predict to make your search effort dramatically more effective, you'll waste time and money when the holiday shopping season gets into gear. 

 

Searching & Almost Finding

Have you noticed that while search functionality is increasingly sophisticated, the ability to find what you're looking for isn't getting easier or faster?

You'd think that the investment of all that brainpower would incrementally or dramatically improve search but evidently the variables and the need to create artificial intelligence tools to sort out results is not progressing as quickly as our collective addiction to search engines. Similarly our patience for landing on a site and getting lost in a thicket of bad navigation or underinvestment in search tools leads to cart abandonment and undercuts efforts at building brand equity, brand advocacy and loyal, repeat customers.

The answer, at least in the short run, is that sites must do the math for customers by tagging, sorting, filtering and pre-searching their merchandise to make it easier and faster to find and buy. Look at the work done by my client Dev Tandon at Trunkt where by understanding the needs and impulses of his customers he has anticipated the search criteria for a broad range of customer segments.

Site visitors can search by color, product description and category , occasion and price. You can also look at other people's picks and at the most popular items. This is all fairly standard stuff. But Dev has also researched his fashion-forward buyers to understand that psycho-demographic factors and even political sensibilities shape how customers search and shop. He has pre-sorted merchandise to address customer interests in organic materials, hand-made goods, eco-friendly materials, items made without labor exploitation, fair trade goods, items using recycled materials and goods designed by artists in selected geographies.

Each of these search assists not only expedites customer action but creates a s a branded experience that encourages joining the community and returning more frequently. The result has been a 25 percent traffic spike driving a 10 percent increase in sales.

This is labor intensive but the investment of time, money and brainpower will pay off and pay out quickly both in terms of conversions, sales and affirmative word of mouth. There are Web 2.0 tools that enable the process and good internal search tools can be licensed at reasonable rates. These are prudent investments even for smaller sites since there is considerable evidence that 1/3 of those landing on your home page immediately use the search function.