The Marketing Plaza

Business and marketing always love acronyms. It’s the reason we have 3Ms, IBMs as brand names not to mention ROIs and KPIs in strategy discussions.*  Sometimes the names are used to mask an original identity, allowing a brand to move into a new era with a new persona. Other times acronyms are used as field jargon to make the presenter appear brilliant and in-the-know.  Other times, and less surreptitiously, the acronyms are just a quick shorthand for fast communications particularly in an increasing digital world limited by character counts. OMG, LOL!

Another use of acronyms is to help people remember things, particularly students studying for tests.  For middle schoolers trying to name the Great Lakes for a social studies test, the acronym HOMES helps them recall Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Not all acronyms work for everyone, but one acronym does suffice for all marketing endeavors.  It takes you back to basics on the ABCs of Marketing – for Always Be Communicating.

There are great debates in the marketing world about what media to use when, and the value return of a broadcast spot on The Daily Show versus a Tweet on Twitter. With aplogies to Marshall McLuhan, the ABCs of marketing remind us that the medium is not the message. The message is the message  and whatever medium allows you to communicate consistently to the right audience is the right medium for you.

If the cost-effectiveness of a blog allows you to communicate more than a broadcast commercial, then a blog is your better bet.  In contrast, if you don’t have the wherewithal to blog and do have the funds to produce a broadcast spot and air it consistently, then the spot hits the spot for your needs.

Marketing plans by definition admit that there is no one solution for everyone, which is why plans need to be carefully crafted based on time, budget, resources, needs, mission and skill sets. But any plan that doesn’t account for the ABCs and gives you great one-time hits, is not a marketing plan at all.  If you are not communicating, you are not marketing.  It’s as basic as it gets; as basic as the ABCs.

*For those who don’t remember or are intimidated by jargon:
3M originally stood for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
IBM was International Business Machines
ROI is Return on Investment
KPI is Key Performance Indicator

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A common tab on a web site is “contact us,” but is it really an invitation to contact?  More times than not, the button is used to collect information about you and doesn’t help you, as the consumer, one iota in contacting the company or service. It’s a perfect example of how most companies still hide before an Internet shield and are not personal, or consumer friendly. Instead, their thinly masked veils of friendliness smack of their real intention of building a e-mail database.

If I am frustrated enough to hit the “constact us” button, the truth is I want to contact you, not be contacted by you.  I want to know when I can call to reach a real person and get a real answer.

Recently, I was on the Continental Airlines web site.  Their contact us service is truly frustrating.  During recent snow storms, their listed phone numbers didn’t work. Their comic book customer service person just kept giving me the same wrong answer to my typed question, no matter how many times I changed how I phrased my query.

But, Continental should not be singled out.  Almost every company on the web has poor contact us protocol, making it hard for the customer to do just that – contact them.  Here’s a tip:  Don’t label the web site tab “contact us” if you aren’t posting the information about how to contact you.  Just giving me a form to give you info about me is not helpful.  I don’t want to give you info about me.  I need your phone number, hours of operation and customer service e-mail.  It’s that simple.

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In the social media world people like to talk about interactive two-way information, but I believe the analogy is limited.  Information is like water.  It flows downstream. Through a strong eco-system that includes evaporation and precipitation, water returns to rivers and streams to reflow.  Information is the same.

Instead of the proverbial two-way arrow presented in so many social media seminars, I see info flow as more circular. I see it flowing downstream from a blogger to the world, then sprinkled out through Tweets and e-mail, blown through the Internet  clouds through link-backs and retweets, filtered through feedback and comments, and only then refined back to the writer for reconsideration.

In the marketing world, we call it  “getting the message out.”  In today’s society, getting out a message is considered a somewhat ‘interruptive” outdated concept, but is it?  The bottom line is that communication starts with sending out a message.

Study after study in the newspaper world showed readers valued the ads as much if not more than the news.  Considered classic interruptive advertising, these newspaper ads had defined, measurable value to the very people they were designed to reach.

In this new social media world, not as much has changed as people would have you believe. People like communities. People like communication. People like to be listened to and valued.  In return, they may prefer you as vendor, product, relationship or brand. Or, they may not.  Yet, it still all begins with communication.

Hence, those companies who have stopped marketing due to the recession, are truly in for a longer drought than those who continue to outpour thoughts, ideas and ongoing communications with prospective partners, stakeholders and customers. The thought economy is like any other. It requires transactions that begin with someone wanting to impart or part with something and someone else willing to access it.

In today’s social media economy, make sure to water your thoughts.  Send them downstream, have patience and continue watering.  Flowers will bloom as well as business, relationships, and expanded thinking.

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Is Shakespeare finally obsolete?  Is it no longer true that a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet?

In marketing, names are the brand, and not naming a company or product correctly can make the road to success all that much harder to travel. Given enough time, money and talent any name can become a household brand, but not everyone has the deep pockets of Apple, Google, Cher or Madonna.

In today’s hyper-connected world, naming protocols are all that more complicated and need to take into account Internet compatibilities among other things.  A new company, for instance, needs to be registered with the correct state authority, but if the corresponding name is not available as a url, even the best name can prove troublesome with online brand congruity.

Initials, once popular in the Fortune 500 realm, from IBM to ATT&T, are difficult for smaller companies.  Initials tent to be hard to remember, don’t help in SEO searches, and feel cold in the ever-funky social media world.  In the digital-sphere, better to have a name that means nothing such as Starbucks for coffee rather than initials that reek of corporate culture.

Unfortunately, small businesses, in particular, sometimes have to just get started with a less than perfect name and deal with the consequences later. But without the deep pockets of larger corporations, rebranding at a later date is not always an option.

The answer?  When starting up – get as  close to the perfect name as soon as possible, but don’t invest too much in it until you’ve completed your due diligence, which includes:

1. A check of state records in any state in which you think you’ll do business.
2. A check of available urls  in the .com arena.
3. A check of alternative url choices in the .com arena.
4. A review of similar names with minor misspellings.
5. A gut check on the look and feel of the name with not only company principals and close loved ones, but a decent designer.

It takes most people nine months, the full gestation period, to choose a name for a new baby.  Businesses frequently  launch in far less time, which can result in some odd or oddly uncreative names, frequently named after the business owner.  If you just want to send out an invoice, any name will do, but if you want to build a brand, get a marketing person on your team to give you a broader view of options.

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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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Newspapers are crashing and burning. I’m not talking about in their own medium — although there’s sad news on that front.  No, I mean in the social media world.  Why?  Because they refuse to modify their message to the medium. It’s an odd commentary for a medium built solidly in the communications world, but one thing newspaper publishers, editors and writers don’t understand is how to use a blog to their best advantage (not to mention Twitter and other social media).

Publishers. Publishers care about publishing. They want the funds to print another day.  Hence, they are concerned with revenue.  Guess what? Blogs are not great revenue producers — at least at first — and publishers are not patient people. They want the ads in today for tomorrow’s edition.  The result?  They are looking for posts that will bring in advertisers. They keep trying to develop content that the Advertising department can sell, rather than content the community wants to read or engage in.  It’s not a good model and it hasn’t worked.

Editors. Editors are a bit better, but also don’t understand the medium.  Great editors understand the need for personality and the public thirst for the news behind the news.  One of my favorite Sunday columns was a local editor’s post on how his reporters got the latest, greatest story — literally the story behind the news. However, the insights were saved for the precious Sunday paper and not posted on the paper’s website.

Another young editor at a different local paper, started a community blog. She inherently understood the need for community voice on the paper’s website, but didn’t understand that community in the blogging world means individuals not organizations.  She approached non-profits in the State with the opportunity to post on a blog set up for local causes. The result is a series of mini-press releases on golf outings and benefactor and grant news rather than insights into the causes.  I can guarantee you that the only people reading the blog are the marketing folks at other non-profits.  The real community isn’t interested.

Writers. Writers understand writing and followings, but newspaper writers are in competition with themselves. They are saving their stories for the paper, hoping to get in the Sunday edition. Their blog posts are bland and again, tend not to tell the story behind the story.  Why was it a difficult story to write?  How did they get a crying mother to admit her son had gone sour? How did they learn about the story in the first place?  Don’t just tell me you wrote a great story. Tell me why you felt it was worthy of the newspaper. Then, you might draw me to your story in the paper, but mostly, I’m not going to bother to read your current blog. It’s not giving me any insight into your craft.

Newspapers are built for blogging.  They just haven’t realized it yet, or approached it in the right way. I wish they would. I’m a news junkie at heart and would eat it up — as would a huge segment of the online world.

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In today’s growing social media world, the key is not so much about creating, but maintaining your presence on your social venue of choice.  This past week, I attended a webinar by Nathan Kievman on maximizing LinkedIn profiles. Yes, even something as simple as LinkedIn requires care, attention and constant updating.  In fact, Nathan has written an entire book on it and  recommends tweaking your LinkedIn profile daily.  There’s no such thing today as a simple Rolodex be it online or in a card deck.

Nathan’s advice is well-taken, but before you spend too much time updating LinkedIn daily — consider if you’re first updating your web site or blog on some frequency — preferably daily.  After all, your web site is your company’s face to the world.

A mother’s lesson: Updating a web site daily is akin to a woman putting on her daily makeup. It’s not a luxury. There are few women who will venture out into the world daily without — as my mother’s generation would have put it — “putting their face on.”  It meant putting on at least the minimal amount of makeup on to put your best face, if not foot, forward to the world.  Every day, your web site faces your prospects and customers, and if it never changes, it quickly looks old or dated and won’t do well in today’s customer speed dating scene.

Reality Check: I can’t imagine many business owners or executives who have the time to update a web site or even their LinkedIn profile daily.  However, not having the time and not recognizing the need are two entirely different things.  If your web site is not being updated daily — including checking the customer guest book and responding to it — then you are not configured for success. This is one clue that you need help either in the form of an employee or service.

Takeaway: The first step towards success is recognizing a need or problem and then solving it.  Recognize that a stagnant web site is a stale and old-fashioned web site and is not presenting you or your company as a modern player.

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Much of what we put out as printers is marketing material for our customers — messaging to help them get their messages across. One of the first rules of marketing is to know your audience and speak in their language. That’s why it’s so interesting that, as an industry, we seem to struggle with communicating about ourselves to both our customers, our employees, and our future employees.

On Tuesday September 16, NAPL will be sending out this month’s edition of NAPL Consultant Ray Prince’s e-newsletter “Prince on Production.” This month, he discusses the work of the Education Summit and the industry’s increasing need to reach out to the younger generation for our future workforce and industry leaders. Ray chairs the committee, which includes reps from all over the industry. Last year’s summit set 6 action items for better positioning the industry for the discerning youthful eye. This year’s breakfast meeting, scheduled for GraphExpo, will review progress to date and then ask for input for new or improved initiatives.

Speaking kid’s speak is truly a different language. In my own personal blog, www.theparentrap.net, I have addressed Teen Speak several times. For instance, do you know the word Chillax? It means to both Chill and relax at the same time. Also, if you sign off a test message with 1-4-3, it means I Love You. Each number represents the letters in the respective word.

Yes, it’s a different world at there. Just a few years ago, my husband and I would not let our daughters wear flip flops to school. Now, we relent in the summer months, and my youngest just got a job at Hollister where flip flops are part of the required dress code! Yes, times keep changing. The challenge for us as employers is to recognize the change, and go along with it where we can. No, we obviously can’t allow flip flops, but perhaps we could start communicating a bit differently in ads using the language of text messaging. It might just have a better chance of being glanced at by a younger eye.

Pazazz Printing in Canada has been getting alot of industry buzz for the YouTube video it launched earlier this year. Did you know, that one of the side benefits of it was that younger potential employees from both within and outside the industry started calling the company because they now thought Pazazz was a potentially cool place to work? If I recall, Warren Werbitt, the CEO, didn’t consider the recruitment potential of the video when he first conceived of it, but he does now.

If you’ve got some ideas on attracting the next generation to the industry, feel free to comment and I’ll share your thoughts with Ray. Better yet, consider attending the Summit. For more information on the upcoming Education Summit, request a copy of the next edition Ray’s newsletter by sending me an e-mail.

Or to receive Ray’s free e-newsletter each month, e-mail the NAPL Subscription Center and put Prince Newsletter in the subject line. In the body copy, please identify yourself in terms of your name, title, phone and company rather than just your e-mail address, so if there’s a delivery problem, we at least know how to get in touch with you, or– heavens — can even snail mail you a copy!

~ Rhona
rbronson@napl.org

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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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