The Marketing Plaza

Starbucks Five Ways of Being are a roadmap for
creating a great brochure in addition to a great coffee experience.

This week on The Blogger’s Bulletin, I wrote a piece on why the Starbucks Five Ways of Being are appropriate advice for bloggers. Here, I’m continuing the analogy with how we can take tips from our local baristas and learn how to improve our brochures and marketing material.  There’s more than coffee that you can take away from a Starbucks encounter.

In The Starbucks Experience (2007), author Joseph Michelli reviews what has made Starbucks not just a new product or service, but part of our current cultural experience. Starbucks has had some trips since then, but likely its strong corporate credos have allowed it to be flexible in better responding to market changes. At Starbucks, they are called the “Five Ways of Being.”

• Be welcoming
• Be genuine
• Be considerate
• Be knowledgeable
• Be involved

It’s a great map for great marketing, particularly a brochure.  Here’s how:

• Welcoming – I recently saw a brochure where the first page was solid type.  It wasn’t a letter or designed as part of the brochure.  It was intimidating to read, heavy on the eyes and not welcoming to the brochure. It made you want to close the piece rather than dig deeper — kind of like a huge Victorian novel with tiny type.  You likely won’t approach it unless it’s assigned reading. Make sure your opening brochure material is just that – open with welcoming content enticing your reader to enter and linger awhile.
• Genuine – Don’t use flamboyant language, make promises you can’t keep, or statements that don’t ring true. Advertising and marketing materials already have a bad rap for puffery.  Not everyone is the best, brightest, cheapest, highest quality.  The trick to real marketing is being real and finding your true unique selling proposition. If you don’t know it, don’t spend money on puff pieces.  The reader can see right through it.
• Considerate – Be conscious of your customers concerns and address those rather than your ego.  No one likes meeting people at parties who just talk about themselves and yet we think marketing is a business resume letting the reader in on all the wonderful things they need to know about us.  It’s not.  Marketing is your introduction. Tell the customer a little about yourself and a lot about themselves.  If they self-identify, they’ll know you’re the right match for them.
• Knowledgeable – Give some information away for free. You’ve already paid to send people the brochure, so give them some value. Read Chris Anderson’s Free, or link to my post about him and think about what you can already provide for free to give prospects a taste of what you have to offer.  Consider Anderson’s Jello example, where free recipes entices people to want to buy Jello as an ingredient.
• Involved – Show how you are up-to-date and involved with your area of expertise.  Is it a passion?  Why would we know?  Bring us into your story and show us how you evolved and are involved.  People like to work with people they feel they want to know.  Get involved with your customers and give them a behind the scenes look into who and what you are.

There they are – the five ways of being and how you can use them in your next brochure. So before you start your next marketing endeavor, slow down, get a cup of coffee and ponder how you want your brochure to come into being.

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Even if you don’t have a marketing budget, you probably have an ad budget.  Or, you’re somewhat willing to spend some money on advertising, even if it’s a directory listing, because somewhere you bought into the idea that you have to get the word out on your business.

True:  Marketing budgets usually contain some allocation to advertising.

False: Having an ad budget does not mean you have a marketing budget. Do not confuse them.  More on this in a future post.

For this post, take a close eye at where you are spending any ad dollars. Here are 3 places to avoid:

1. The Yellow Pages.  Unless your business is extremely local, and unless you’re a plumber — this is no longer the vehicle it used to be.  Most people searching for local businesses use internet directories, many of which are free.  And, if your business is extremely local, unless you are a pizza parlor, I’d ask why you’ve put limits on your own geographic reach.

2. The Trade Press. Advertising in your own trades is just an ego boost.  Trades advertising is best for vendors to your business — manufacturers, supply chain vendors and services who cater to your business.  Small businesses who advertise in their own trades are largely trying to look bigger to their competitors. There’s a place for this type of campaign, but it’s not for the majority of small businesses with limited marketing budgets.

3. The Local Baseball Field. There’s some  value to having your name as a sponsor on local playing field. However, it’s not all that much and it’s largely community service.  I’m not saying don’t put your logo and name on playing field, but if you do –realize you are doing it for 2 reasons.  One, again is ego.  Ego has no place in marketing. The second is to be a good community citizen, and there’s great value in that.  However, then you should have the dollars allocated from the community service side of your marketing budget or plan and not from the ad budget. After all, you are not largely reaching your key target audience and your ROI is likely to be low if measurable at all.

There are many crazy places to advertise these days from urinal stalls to stadium turnstiles.  Most are not recommended.  Unless you are a BIG GUY (in branding not in personal height or weight), don’t consider the crazy notions until you’ve got basics covered.  What are the basics?  That’s a difficult question that varies by company, goals and plan. But, I can tell you the three above are not part of anyone’s basics unless they are living in the 1950’s.

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There’s always a new type of marketing on the horizon.   Here’s a short list of just some of your choices

Here’s the answer. Don’t get intimidated by the jargon. Most great marketing is based on never- changing fundamentals, not the least of which include amazing creativity, intuition, risk-taking, knowledge of the market, and a clear understanding of what you have to offer and why it’s wanted and needed.

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Where do PR and advertising fall in the Marketing Toolkit?  As with everything else these days, they are both evolving, and through Darwinian logic are becoming more assimilated in the Internet Age. Years ago, in the mass market era, marketing was advertising.  Then, PR became more popular and split as its own area of specialization replete with PR agencies separate from ad agencies.  If there was any early distinction it may have been that PR was for celebrities and advertising for products, but the Tylenol scare of 1986 clearly changed all that. Brand managers learned that PR had a big place to play in their marketing plans and not always just for crisis management.

PR continued to grow in stature as brand managers also learned that an item mentioned in a news article had more credibility than a straight ad.  Advertising agencies suddenly needed PR partners on the team. Then, team dynamics changed. Twelve years later, in 2002, advertising guru Al Reis and his daughter Laura Reis went so far as to espouse the death of advertising in their book The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.

Today, I'd venture to say PR is advertising — almost direct mail advertising.   PR now targets specific customers rather than groups of customers. This is best discussed in David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Unfortunately, most printing companies never latched on to the potential of PR even in the days when it was a relatively simple science.  They never hired staff or affiliated with freelancers with strong writing skills and never felt they had enough news to share with the world.  In today's world, where everything is about the latest news (newspaper woes aside), well done press releases now position forward-thinking businesses as experts in their field with news about topics rather than events or staff promotions. It's a way to get a message out to a public increasingly through Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail messages directly to prospects and current customers, and a tiny little bit of pitching to the media (increasingly trade over mainstream). 

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say PR has grown up.  More accurately, it's probably experiencing its second childhood — taking the big boys to the teen playground of modern social media.

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In preparing for a speech I’m giving on Marketing at GraphExpo, I’m currently reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. It’s not easy reading, so here’s my confession: I’m actually listening to it on an Ipod while walking the dog. It’s not great, but it’s the kind of book you almost have to be familiar with in this day and age. Here’s one simple phrase I got out of it last night: “The computer is not a box, but a doorway.” It’s a simple look into how the world of computing and marketing has changed.

TV was the original black box and, in many ways, still is. Its one-way communication with advertising that can easily be skipped through the magic of DVRs. When TV first came on the scene, it was a social experience with entire neighborhoods gathered around one set for a Milton Berle show. Today, more sets are watched by just one person. Even children’s programming seems increasingly watched by a child alone rather than a parent and child.

Computers are almost the exact opposite. The computer started out as a solo black box but with the emergence of Web 2.0, is an increasingly social and multi-faceted communication vehicle. Even if you appear alone at the terminal, the odds are you are increasingly interacting with someone.

It’s my hope that this Linked In group won’t be a one-way communication, but that you’ll respond to the occasional post, ask questions on the discussion board, find things of interest from the group that will lead you to other resources and ideas, and make suggestions back to me about what you’d like to see more of from us.

~ Rhona
rbronson@napl.org

P.S. If you’re going to GraphExpo, please stop by the NAPL booth and say hello. Or, better yet, sign up for my seminar on Wed. at 10am. It’s almost the last seminar of the show and although a few hardy souls have signed up, I’m sure I could use the extra company. The time slot is almost as bad as being the first speaker after a large lunch!

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