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| Mad Men and the era of 1960's advertising |
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| Mute is my favorite button |
Traditional TV advertising is easily skipped and avoided as
DVR technology reaches most US households. And with all due respect to John Coltrane, the mute button on my remote is one of my favorite things.
What
makes this man mad is to see advertisers insult me with their campaign to shove
their products at me. From cars, banks to insurance companies, the wasteful money spent on annoying and irritating communications is remarkable. Think about what those dollars could do if those companies invested in things like real people to answer the phone when you want help or how about making better products?
Can traditional print or broadcast stay relevant to
consumers as brands struggle to be credible and meaningful to the average Joe
and Jane. With thousands of messages bombarding us, who has time, interest or patience to withstand the flood of watered down communications?
Here are three better ways to effectively build a brand.
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| Invest in lending a helping hand |
Invest in
meaningful relationships with consumers. How can brands get involved in
activities that bring meaning and value to a community? I lead a marketing
committee for a non-profit who recently received a $100,000 donation due to a
community sponsored program by IKEA. The Life Improvement Project was a way of
demonstrating how a brand can be a great citizen in the community by promoting not
itself but an individual who wanted to help their community. The Frankie Lemmon School, a non-profit who serves developmentally disabled children was the
recipient of IKEA’s largesse. Their $100,000 could have been used to push their
key messages onto consumers. Instead, they recognized the true terms of endearment. Ikea's one act has change how I view their brand as they have demonstrated a
powerful alternative to the deafening blah, blah blah of traditional
advertising.
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| Invest in your people |
Invest in
your people. Companies are finding that their employees can be powerful
advocates for the good work that they do. Investing in a day of community
services can unleash hundreds or thousands of hours of goodwill in a community.
What’s the power of people who you want to reach hearing from your employees
positive messages about your company? Said another way, would you rather run a
print ad for $5,000 or give 20 people a chance to spend 8 hours helping your
community through their good work and services? Seems an easy choice.
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| Bring knowledge to your professional community |
Invest in
your relationships with your partners like customers, distributors, agents and brokers.
A marketing colleague from another industry related to me recently that she had
started an educational program with current and prospective clients with money
they used to use for B2B advertising. They created a forum to bring together
distributors along with current and prospective customers. The funds allowed
them to demonstrate along their value chain that they want to help support
their industry by being a facilitator of knowledge and a conduit of new ideas.
The money was used to bring speakers and training to their target market
without asking for anything in return. No quid pro quo. What the company did
receive, over a few years of activities, was a chance to build human contacts
and real relationships. They brought Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to a
personal and in-person experience. The results have been significant as this
firm built a new reputation and image based on value. By investing marketing
dollars in forums where dialogues could be held, they shifted their business
from being stagnant to a new trajectory of growth.
I love the image of the Mad Men era as much as anyone. Don,
Betty, Joan and the whole gang will be back for another season of make believe
marketing from a time gone by. But like many things from the 1960’s, marketing
has changed quite a bit. Yet so many agencies are still acting like flooding the airwaves still works. P&G recently announced a shift away from traditional TV and print into new dynamic digital engagement that over time, will shake up
Madison Avenue.
My advice is simple: Engage. Enlighten. Enchant.
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| I need this product when I watch most TV commercials |
And pass me the remote so I can mute this stupid insulting
advertisement.
You won't have any customers with whom you can invest in meaningful relationships if you don't let them know your product exists and what it does. Smart, very profitable companies use advertising and can prove its effectiveness. There's an old saying: "Running a business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark. You know you're doing it, but no one else does."
ReplyDeleteWonderful post; I agree with what you are saying. I don't even watch TV. Instead I prefer to watch my favorite shows (Mad Men included) on DVD.
ReplyDeleteThe way that I find out about good products and companies is either by word of mouth or first-hand encounters. For example, I discovered Keurig machines from using them at work; and then became convinced to buy one via a special set up in Target. While you may not see so many door-to-door salesmen anymore, I must admit that I do like to see a product in action (and read reviews) before I take the leap and buy a product.
Great insights though -- thank you for sharing!
Shona,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind comments about the post. Real world experience with a brand is so valuable because you get to test the BS you hear in an advertisement about service or features. I once spoke with the CEO of McDonalds, Jack M. Greenberg, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. He believed that the cleanliness of the rest room and real in-store experiences were more important than any advertising. And, they actually spent more money on real in-store experience than ads.
Hi Jeffrey,
ReplyDeleteI love the entire flavor and content of this post. It reminds me of my early days in radio broadcasting. My little station played "beautiful music" and we had a whopping 8 employees in Canton, OH. One each month, our corporate office would send us a 2 hour produced show centered on one artist - Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee.
My marketing creation was to print up small, ticket-sized little flyers with the time and date of the show as if it was a live concert. Each employee was asked to hand out 10 per day for the month leading up to the "concert." It was the only advertising we could afford. Then we made sure to advertise our stations USP during the broadcast.
After 12 months, we were the #1 station in Canton by a good margin.
When we handed the cards out, we would first ask if the person, for example, like the music of _______ . We would then give then a "free ticket" to the concert event.
So every contact was personal and the product presentation was relevant and relational. Thanks to a central product to promote, different promo material, and a lot of shoe leather, we got the job done.
We have a lot more promotional choices today, but the basics of a personal touch, a relevant product with a unique USP, imaginative promotion are all still important today. Thanks for the thought stimulating post.