Atomic Ideas - Helping You Sell More Stuff!

Drunken Monkeys

When marketing anything, you need to do research in order to understand your best potential customers. What never ceases to amaze, is the sheer amount of information that's out there. 

In searching for background info for an adult beverage product, this video popped up. While it didn't yield much in the way of marketing insights, it did generate a lot of ideas for creative execution.

Simple Stuff

As part of my on-going appreciation for “Keeping It Simple” advertising, I recently came across these ads:

This ad, a call for entries for the ArtDirectorsClub awards, alludes to a basic tenant for good and successful creative work. You simply have to put in extra to do good things. Great dramatic visual – in the middle of the city, in the middle of the night, when everyone else is fast asleep, two people are still burning the oil to make something great– that is what it takes.

 

I like this two-ad Audi campaign that ran in Great Britain. Basically, they’re all-type ads with a creative twist.

These are a couple of simple ads that are part of an on-going campaign promoting Alabama college funding gifts. It’s a great idea for the gift giver, the colleges and the potential student. These ads have a simple creative look with great headlines.

On my Steeb-O-Meter, (a rating system for evaluating projects on film, video, music, television and print on a scale of 1 - 63), I’m giving each project a 58. (Although, I think Audi stole the speedometer idea from me.)

Social Media ROI

We had a meeting with a services company this afternoon. They said they were new to the process of social media and were interested in getting involved.

And as is often the case when you're not familiar with something, you sometimes ask simple yet insightful questions.

One of the people asked about measuring the return on investment on social media.

Good question. 

We knew most companies we've talked with that were actively involved with social media hadn't established measurements on what kind of results they were looking to achieve. After the meeting I went online and found a report done last fall by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education that flabbergasted me.

 

Only 16% of professionals measure ROI? Makes you wonder - if you're spending real time and money towards social media and you're not measuring the ROI.....why?

Can an iPhone Replace a Laptop?

The worst thing imaginable happened last Friday; my trusty Mac laptop died.

I guess I should have known that the five year old hard drive was probably going to break sometime soon. But I wasn't expecting it to happen on the day that I had to complete a proposal and a multitude of other things on that very machine.

Like a lot of people these days, I use my laptop as my primary computer. And since I'm out on the road a lot, I need it with me at meetings and other places where it is important to getting things done.

Luckily I have an Apple iPhone. So I decided to see whether or not the iPhone could substitute for my laptop. It quickly became apparent that the little device is a heckuva lot more than just a phone. In fact, to give you an example of it's versatility, right now I'm actually dictating this blog post using a little app called Dragon Dictate which, by the way, was free - pretty freaking incredible! Its accuracy of speech to text is amazing!

Of course, I can access my e-mail on the fly (admittedly nothing special these days), look at PDFs and documents. I can access the Internet with a browser that looks and functions (except for flash) pretty much like the Safari browser on my Laptop. No other smart device does it better. In short, I can do many of the things that I can do on my laptop, right on my iPhone - or should I say my ihandheld computer. I've been a big fan of the iPhone ever since they managed to make it into something that works for business. Let me tell you, it's pretty fantastic to be able to sit here and dictate this post right now on this little device.

The last few days I've written radio spots on it and emailed them to clients. I have looked at PowerPoint presentations, responded to people, kept a diary of all the food I'm eating because I'm trying to lose weight (new year's Rez). If you have an iPhone and your determined to slim down, check out an app called Lose It -phenomenal. To be sure there are some limitations, but frankly the iPhone is an amazing replacement for a laptop if you're forced to use it that way, as I currently am. It just goes to show that technology has come so far, and we take so much of it for granted. We forget to think about how unbelievable it all truly is. Only 5 to 6 years ago, a lot of this stuff was not available to us on handheld devices, unless they were many thousands of dollars.

My little experiment with the iPhone as a replacements for my laptop has really opened my eyes to the capabilities of the little machine. It's truly amazing. I realize that there are many other smart phones out there, but this thing is pretty darn amazing. Did I mention that I am dictating this post, not typing it, using Dragon dictate. I dictated the whole thing in maybe five minutes and it took me perhaps ten more to correct the very few errors that were in it. By the way, that would not have been possible on my laptop. I don't have that application, and it probably would of cost me $500. Dragon Dictation for the iPhone - free!

Oh yeah, and of course I am using my TypePad app for the iPhone to post this post.

Then there's all the hoopla and buzz over the new E-reader devices that are out there. I actually had one of the first e-readers on the market made by Sony. It was given to me by my business partners back in I think around 2001. A good device. But it really wasn't that much different than the Kindle and other devices that are being talked about so much today except for no wireless. Guess they're just more relevant now - nobody bought them back then unless they were tech geeks like me.

The iPhone on the other hand is a full-color e-reader, amongst all the other things it does. I use it to purchase all my books wirelessly and read them. Having experienced other e-readers, I would say that the iPhone is about the best device out there for reading a book and doing everything else you need to do in your life - so who really needs a Kindle. Not me.

By The way, nobody's paying me to say these things, it's just a fact of life that this device is an incredible little machine. I suggest that everyone goes out and buys one immediately. Of course, If Apple wants to pay me for shilling their product I'll gladly accept their their money. Did I mention that that I dictated this post? Awesome!

One Small Tweet for Man

The first tweet from space was sent by a NASA astronaut on January 22. It was sent by flight engineer TJ Creamer:

"Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s"

And even though it was a simple message, it underscored the power of social media as viable tool to reach out to more segments of your audience. It also should be a wake-up call to companies who have been dragging their feet about incorporating Social Media into their marketing mix. They have just fallen even further behind in the cyberspace race. 

Give the people what they want

Like traditional advertising, in order for social media to work, you have to understand your audience and give them what they want -- something that helps solve a problem, something that fills a need, or something that entertains. Hopefully what follows is the latter.

Forty-five years later.

 

I was helping clear out some old things at my dad's the other day and ran across a stack of old Esquire magazines. They were all from the years '64 to '68.  I remembered seeing them as a kid and they were always intriguing to me. The covers were always fascinating and created great interest with subject matter that was always controversial. It wasn't until I was in college that learned that ad man George Lois created them. 

So, in the spirit of advertising, and perhaps, Mad Men, I thought I’d peruse a few issues and pull out some interesting car ads from that era, and then show some examples from today, 45 years later.

Here’s an ad for the 1965 Chevy Caprice, featuring its interior's elegance,

 

Now, here are a couple of Land Rover ads touting their luxuries for 2010,

   

This is a Jaguar ad from 1966,

  

It’s an ad for a luxury vehicle in black and white and it’s on page 1 of Esquire. The copy and headline are quite laid-back. Notice, it seems they didn’t feel compelled to put a logo in the ad. It reeks of confidence.

Here’s an ad for the 1966 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia,

  

In a clever manner, Volkswagen didn’t quite want to show it off then, as they don’t want to show off the 2010 Touareg today.  See below.

 
  

Just a few observations.

Listening to Who Really Leads

As companies move from focusing on quick sales to deeper customer relationships, there's a specific area that needs to be addressed.

The mother lode of information on how to improve your product offering in order to sell more stuff - firsthand customer feedback. Not a two-way mirrored room of paid focus group attendees. 

Your living, breathing customers and prospects.The voice(s) of your customer. 

There's been a mad rush to social media platforms, to find out what customers are saying about your company - the good, bad, and ugly. Monitoring online conversations is not that hard. Many services can automate that for you. 

The heavy lifting is when you look inside your company and examine any and all obstacles to the flow of customer information. If customer information drives business decisions (and shouldn't it?), anything that gets in the way of accessing this information should be eliminated. Get rid of any blockage to the flow of real-time customer insights. 

Let your customers be heard offline, and they'll have less to gripe about online. Quite often the online moaning is about a crummy, real-world experience.

Yes, it's much harder to improve your company's over-all customer service than to set up a Twitter monitor or Facebook page. But very much worth it. And it's proactive. By the time someone's tweeting about your company it's often a gripe, so you end up primarily doing damage control.

What if the complaint/concern was solved offline, in a timely, polite, personal way? What if anyone who comes in contact with your customers - billing department, receptionist, truck drivers - passed along the information they gleaned to your 'customer care' department? And the idea of having a 'Customer Care Officer' at companies worldwide is starting to catch on. There were 30 in 2003. Today there are over 300.

There needs to be an awareness that anyone who has any form of contact with a customer is in sales. And good salespeople are good listeners. Customers are talking now more than ever, and want to interact deeply with companies. Is everyone at your company listening closely and passing on what they hear? Gathering the unvarnished comments that can help you shape what/how you sell?

A new advertising truism in 2010 is that 'content is king', and who better to influence what content is written and then sent out to the many different media channels? Tailor content to match what the people buying your stuff are most interested in learning about.

What if customers told you what they wanted, and you respond accordingly? Your marketing will be more relevant, your company reputation will improve, your long-term customer relationships will increase. Nice benefits to listening and responding.

photo: mark emery  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Online and Social Tools - Have The Dems Forgotten How They Got To The White House?

Just over one year ago, Advertising Age named Barack Obama Marketer of the year. Everyone knows the story by now of how his team used online marketing and social media tools to literally blow away his competition. Nobody before him had ever done that and it turned the marketing of party and politicians upside down. You would think that would be memorable, especially to Democrats. Apparently, it's not.

As a new Advertising Age article points out, Massachussets Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley either forgot about or "Ignored Obama's Digital-Media Playbook." The facts that she's losing big-time and her opponent actually apparently owns a copy of Obama's playbook makes that an awfully big mistake.

The article does a great job of covering Ms. Coakley's "old-school" tactics versus Republican State Senator Scott Brown's aggressive Facebook, Twitter and YouTube efforts. And it really is truly is amazing that she didn't utilize any of the tools until the eleventh hour.

However, there is no mention of something I wrote about at the time Obama won the Marketer of the year award, the subject of his brand and how it shaped his victory. Without it, he may not have won: 

Obama and his team built a clearly-differentiated, consistent brand around their candidate and then utilized all the traditional and digital branding tools available to achieve their goals and humble the Republican party. In Fast Company, Keith Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide was quoted as saying, "Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand, new, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets."

Obama's "breakaway" brand characteristics.

Along with those three key attributes for Barack, Brand Obama had the following characteristics that every great brand has built into it's DNA:

1. A compelling creation story.
2. A charismatic, visionary leader.
3. A clearly defined, simple position that clarified their mission and purpose simply and easily for everyone... "Change." They never wavered, even in the face of adversity.
4. An iconic logo that clearly communicated their position and served as the foundation of their identity system across all channels.
5. Formidable enemies (non-believers - think Coke vs. Pepsi) to overcome, and reams of intelligence at their disposal to help hone strategy, determine weakness and take the fight to Hilary Clinton first and then John McCain and the entire Republican party.
6. A Belief System =  vision, values, trust, relevance, leadership. All great brands create a culture
   of belief.
7. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

At the end of the day, it is definitely not all about the tools you use market your message.

Martha Coakley's biggest mistake may be that she doesn't have a clearly defined, compelling brand strategy and message to elevate and differentiate her from Senator Brown's brand... the competition. If you don't have that, all the messaging and engagement tools in the world, traditional or digital, can't help you win.

Are we supposed to take the Volt seriously?

Was it the government's idea (that they forced on Chevy)? Or was it Chevy's idea (that they forced on Campbell-Ewald)? Or was it just bad thinking on Campbell-Ewald's part? 

Someone has to be held accountable for this laughable launch at the LA car show. Who are they marketing the Volt to? Elementary school students? We all know how many cars seven year olds are likely to buy in the next year or so.