The Marketing Plaza

What can you learn from a marketing campaign that misses the mark?  Plenty.

We invited two printing company CEOs who succeed at marketing to be part of an NAPL panel at the 2009 Top Management Conference in Tucson.  Both had won awards and we wanted them to share their knowledge and approach to marketing with the other attendees.  One of the panelists had won a total of four marketing awards — two gold and two silver.  I assumed he would discuss the gold awards.  Wrong.  He insisted he only wanted to discuss one of the silver awards and talk about why it didn't win a gold.

He started his discussion with "Let me tell you why this campaign didn't win a gold."  He went on to discuss how it was a great campaign, got the company entry into key decision makers at targeted companies, but didn't succeed largely due to timing (he was targeting retail just as the economy soured particularly for that sector).  But, he noted, the program worked on many levels and they are not abandoning it. Rather, they are fine tuning it in the coming year for other market segments.

Hazzah –  a CEO who realizes that marketing is not always perfect out of the gate and that we can all learn valuable lessons from failures as well as successes. Ironically, the panel followed a key note address by leadership guru David Ulrich in which Ulrich noted that all great leaders have experienced failure in their lives.  The distinguishing factor about a great leader is that he or she learns from the mistakes and goes on to even greater things. The famous example is always Abraham Lincoln, but I have a new hero — David Pitts, from Classic Graphics in North Carolina.  He's the guy on the panel who was determined to discuss lessons learned in missing the Gold.

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The word that is.  Recently I went on a printer's web site that claimed innovative service.  Well said, but was it believable?  Not if you looked at the rest of the web site surrounding the words. 

• The copy had been written for a long shelf life and had not been updated in a few years or months. 
• The pictures were pale (innovation would imply vibrancy to me), and the photos showed presses. Perhaps they were innovative presses, but from the customer's perspective, who can say?
• There were no innovative aps — pages flipping, audio files, video.
• There was no interactivity — not even one form to fill out, or "contact us" button — and those aren't really very interactive.

In short, the web site was nothing more than words on the screen, reflecting the printers penchant for putting words on paper, but little else.

So here's the question:  Who are you marketing to anyway?

If it's a potential customer (as one would hope), the word "innovative" has to reflect what it means in customers' minds and has to have some teeth behind it. Before you claim to be innovative, it would be nice to know exactly how the customer defines it, but you don't have any more time to wait. Start getting info from customers, but meanwhile — tomorrow — start updating your web site.  It's hard to claim "innovative" anything if you don't even have an innovative "skin", or web site.  It's a basic just like having a modern building with running water.  And, it doesn't have to cost you a small fortune.  Just like flat screen TVs, iPhones and all other technically wizardry, web programming and design has also become more affordable. Go get you some — technical wizardry that is.

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1:1 marketing by definition is about getting personal — letting the recipient feel like a person, someone who you know. Increasingly, companies understand the value of getting personal.  What they are less comfortable with is getting personality.  Since marketing is about personality, it's little wonder that so few companies are masters at it.

Creating a corporate personality is something many companies overlook, ignore, or perceive as outside their comfort zone .  Then, those very same bland companies wonder why they're perceived by customers as a commodity. 

"A lot of people are very upset, but I saw this coming," said Larry Britton, a 61-year-old electrician who grew up reading The Rocky but found it less relevant and distinctive in recent years. "You could swap writers around and not see a difference," Mr. Britton said.

There's a lot to learn from newspapers in their ongoing and current demise.  If you don't want to follow in their footsteps, don't assume that they are all that different from you.  Instead, look to learn from their experience. Invest in a personality. It's something that can differentiate you. A personality is what makes people talk about you.  Some will love you. Some may not.  But, the marketing point is, they will be talking. That used to be called "Word of Mouth."  Now, it's just Buzz.

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