Let your personality show

Just for a minute, pretend that you are getting ready for your a blind date. If your friend is to be believed, then the person you’re meeting is a perfect fit for you. Smart, attractive, funny, stable, healthy, and ready for a commitment. You’re excited and of course, you want to make the best impression.

Invariably you find yourself rethinking your wardrobe and trying to decide whether to go with your best colors, or decide which combination of shirt and pants will portray you as both fun yet dependable. You stand in front of the mirror and work to make yourself presentable. You style your hair, maybe put on a bit of cologne, shave … everything you can think of to make that good first impression.

But you know that looks aren’t everything so you rehearse your date. You stand in front of the mirror and practice your laugh, your ‘interested’ look, your serious face … heck, you probably even brainstorm topics of conversation and respond to imagined questions with very thoughtful and sincere answers. You try to think up ideas that will present you as both an eloquent and informed person, but also an effective and attentive listener. After all, this person you’re meeting could be ‘the one’ and you want to make sure that you’re presenting yourself in the best possible way.

In many ways, advertising is just like going on a date. As a company, your marketing is trying to woo a customer; it’s trying to attract people and get them to feel like your service is exactly what they need to solve their problem or make them happy. The best way to do this is to use your marketing to help potential customers get a taste of what it’d be like to do business with you. Your marketing should generate the same reaction to the viewer as they would experience when they walk through your doors for the first time.

You need to let your personality show.

In a previous blog titled ‘It’s not me, it’s you‘ I discussed the importance of designing your marketing campaign from the viewpoint of the customer. After all, it’s not enough that your marketing says what you want it to say. That won’t resonate with the customer. Your marketing needs to say what the client wants to hear. If you can address their needs and make them feel good about choosing you to satisfy their desires, your marketing stands a far greater chance of success.

But your marketing also needs to reflect the essence and the experience of doing business with you. It needs to sell the customer not only on the informational level, but also on the aesthetic level. Your advertising should represent exactly what it feels like to do business with you.

If you are a family restaurant, then your advertising should convey a fun, comforting kid-friendly environment. If your marketing reflects a classy, upscale or romantic feel, there’s a disconnect between who you are and who you’re representing yourself to be.

If you’re a lawyer your advertising needs to command a level of responsibility and trust. But if it looks as if it were created on a typewriter and has a picture of you in a wrinkled shirt that looks as if it was taken off a cell phone, it won’t matter if you are the best attorney in the state, people are going to see that you didn’t put the effort into your advertising and infer that you’re likely not the person who will give 100% toward their case.

If you are a car dealer, you’re not just selling cars and the feeling of freedom to your customers but you are also battling the stigma that car salesmen are dishonest and/or that the cars they sell aren’t always reliable. Your advertising should reflect reliability and honesty. However, if your marketing is distracting or confusing and is replete with disclaimers, confusing jargon or features images of vehicles that look well past their prime, it won’t matterthat you are honest and all your cars are reliable — your advertising is feeding into the stereotypical car dealer cliché.

The old saying that ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’ is very important when it comes to advertising. You cannot consider any marketing effort to be an afterthought, or something that is just ‘thrown together’ at the last minute. If your ad or flier or commercial or brochure doesn’t truly represent and convey the experience of doing business with you,  you are sending an imprecise and conflicting message to your customers.

Your marketing should be a faithful extension of your business identity. Advertising is a very deliberate and thoughtful process designed to attract, communicate and persuade complete strangers that you have a solution to their needs. Reading or viewing your advertising piece should convey the same feelings and instill the same confidence as if you personally were sitting down and having a one-on-one conversation with your client. In many ways, advertising is just like getting ready for that first date. You want to like them, and you want them to like you so it’s critically important that you put your best foot forward.

Whether it is you or your agency who designs your marketing, make sure that everything is developed in such a way as to allow the personality — not just the offerings — of you business show. Customers need to feel what its like to do business with you and your marketing is their first contact point with you. If you can’t be everywhere at once (and who can?), then your marketing is inevitably going to be that initial point of contact and it needs to precisely convey exactly what the potential customer will experience once they pick up that phone or walk through that door.

Can you say that your marketing does that for you? Maybe you need to take it out on a date … just to be sure.

The true cost of an identity crisis

What is the most valuable asset to your business? Is it your employees? Is it your product? Is it your building? Your location?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Too much negativity to start a column? Sorry about that. The most powerful and valuable asset to any business is …

…. its brand.

So what is a brand? Most often, people look at a brand as one thing:  the logo. Most often, when clients approach me about designing their logo they just say “give me a logo that works like the Nike logo … or the McDonald’s logo … or the Coca-Cola logo. Give me a logo that provides my business with instant notoriety; something that will sell my product, market my company and cure cancer — all before breakfast.”

The problem to that line of thinking is that a logo is just a picture. There is no single image, that when introduced, will be instantly effective in communicating every product, service or message a business wishes to introduce to the public. Many people see the Nike, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola logos and are instantly reminded of their products, services and messages and, to put it bluntly, they see the logo as the vessel of the message and not the product of a consistent marketing and branding effort.

Truth is the Nike swoosh was nothing more than just an image when the first shoe introduced to the public back in 1971 (ironically it was just a design element on a shoe — the original company – Blue Ribbon Sports – it wasn’t until 1978 that the company changed its name to Nike). It took 7 years of branding and marketing efforts to tie the swoosh with the name Nike (founderbios.com). So even one of the most recognizable logos in the entire world took seven years to reach a point of prominence where it Nike was recognized by a mass audience.

There is more to a brand than just a logo. A brand is the product you sell and the quality of its performance; it is the service provided by the people who sell to or service the customers; it is the innovation and intellectual property that spurs the ideas the company introduces; and it’s the philosophy and approach to business. In time, a logo — like Nike, McDonalds and Coca-Cola — can come to embody all these elements, but it is not an overnight solution. A solid brand identity is the result of a quality product consistently reinforced by a thoughtful message, quality product and marketing effort over a an extended period.

Let’s briefly look at how to build a brand, and let’s start with the obvious…

THE LOGO

In my time, I have seen some beautifully created logos; true works of art. Elegant, eye-catching and creative. And I’ve seen the businesses with these logos fail quickly. I’ve also seen the most hideous, drunk-sketch-on-a-greasy-napkin logo become an iconic symbol of a successful company (Two Men and a Truck). A successful, effective logo is timeless meaning that it does not changed year-to-year, but rather is consistently reinforced and pushed into the public arena.

Every time a company introduces a new logo, it effectively destroys or at the very least, degrades any headway the previous logo had on the public consciousness. I’ve seen too many companies believe that simply changing their logo will boost their fortunes, and I’ve seen too many ad agencies advocate a logo change for no other reason than they don’t like the design.  If  a business does decide to change its logo it needs to be part of a bigger strategy; one that designed to reintroduce the new look and reinforce the existing messaging so that the new look becomes intertwined with the existing marketing message.

I could spend time going into great detail on what makes for effective logo creation, but this article is about branding so to keep us on topic, so instead I’ll refer to my personal blog entry about logo creation. It is decidedly written to help graphic designers develop effective and versatile logos, but still provides valuable ideas and information any business owner evaluate his existing logo design or the ideas provided by the designer or agency.  You can read it by clicking here.

CONSISTENCY

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make — particularly small businesses — is that they do not promote themselves in a consistent manner. Any marketing message, and advertising product (brochures, business cards, print ads, television, web sites, blogs, flyers, posters, packaging, etc…) must follow a consistent design standard.  Too often, people get caught up in looking at a brochure as being a standalone project than their business card or their print ad; each one with a different set of criteria and as a result the visual representation or messaging across an entire campaign differs from one project to another. This diminishes your brand effectiveness.

It’s important that design and messaging standards are established at the corporate level and enforce the consistent application of those guidelines to every product, every employee, every storefront and every product.  A few of these include:

• Colors – Pick specific Pantone colors or set specific color builds (your agency or printer can help with this).
• Logo size and application – Dictate the where, the size and how and your logo to be used in all applications (ask your agency or graphic designer to develop a written set of logo standards).
• Tagline – Pick a specific tagline and stick to it, do not change across multiple projects.
• Fonts – Choose specific fonts to be used in all your marketing, advertising and packaging — I recommend having a single Serif and Sans Serif font choice and the option for a Script font; once set, do not deviate.
• Images – Identify and select what time of images can and cannot be used in your marketing. If you have an artistic, hand-drawn style, do not mix in photography; if you cater to high-end clients, use quality photography, not clip-art.

Ideally, a consistent brand results in the continual reinforcement of your identity across your entire product line and marketing efforts, with each project providing support and feeding identical messaging to every other subsequent process. This is how to build brand awareness and consistently reinforce your product or service.

MESSAGING

Maintaining a consistent message is very important to building a strong brand. The easiest application of this concept is through a tagline (a short, 3-7 word phrase which sums up your service, the founding ideals of the company, or the benefit to the customer.

A recent discussion on the Marketing Design Group on LinkedIn asked for contributions as to the most overused and cliché ideas. It’s a pretty entertaining list to be sure and a good litmus test to ensure that your company isn’t recycling an overused concept employed by other businesses — or worse, your competition. Read it here (Note: You may have to create/log-in to LinkedIn to view the discussion).

It is important that a company distances itself from its competition through a unique and relevant marketing proposition. If the message is similar to that of another business, or if a company changes its message project by project, the end result is that mixed or conflicting messages exist in the public arena. That company can no longer be identified by a unified idea or thought, but will more likely be seen as a business with no sense of self-identity – and it’s hard to trust a company who is unsure of who it is, or what value it brings to the table.

EMPLOYEES

Have you ever considered that your employees are probably one of the biggest contributors to your brand’s value, or the biggest contributor to your brand’s decline? It’s absolutely true.

Your employees are often the front line defense in protecting your brand (and a big element to brand value is your reputation). If your employees are involved and take a personal investment in providing the highest-level of service and exemplify the ideals of your company, your brand and reputation is strengthened; if they provide inferior service or reflect upon your company in a negative light, your brand is diminished.

Your employees get more face time with customers than does ownership. It’s critically important that their approach to your business and delivering your message is consistently reinforced.

BRAND IS EVERYTHING

The one thing that will always follow a company is the value of its brand. It’s the most important asset a company has and contributes more over a length of time than any other factor.

Employees may leave and can always be replaced. A building doesn’t speak to the value of a company and a location can always change.  Computers and furniture can be easily replaced when damaged or broken.

Damage to a brand can take years to recover from, or may prove to be a fatal blow to a company’s success. Your brand is the heart of your company and is a vital living, breathing component which feeds all future success. Take care of it. Develop it. Nurture it and take whatever steps are necessary to protect it.

What are your thoughts on brand value? Leave a comment and contribute to the discussion.

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Don’t sacrifice tomorrow for the needs of today

In a sad way, it’s funny that the marketing budget is typically the first expense a business cuts when it faces a financial hardship. It’s funny that a company would choose to cut the very vehicle it needs to solve its problem, and that is to reach and solicit business from its customers.  I understand why a business would choose to cut marketing out from its expenses; it is an easy way to save a big chunk of money right away. But ultimately it’s a shortsighted maneuver that has much longer lasting repercussions.

Think about this: From 2000 to 2008, the population of Colorado increased 14.8% (2009, quickfacts.census.gov) which translates to roughly 79,680 new residents each year statewide. That figure just accounts for the overall growth, it does not count for the loss of residents who move to a different state or even a different community. If a company decides to stop advertising (just for one year) it not only loses out on reaching all those potential new clients, but it also loses all those existing customers who have moved elsewhere. Granted, this number reflects 79,680 across the state, so it’s not like any business instantly loses potential business with that many people. Overall, the amount of new arrivals will be far smaller and fluctuate based on the size of the community (urban area see a greater amount of new residents, rural areas fewer).  But for any business, especially a small business, how many customers can it afford to lose and fail to replace and still remain viable? Not many.

Without a marketing effort in place to attract new customers to replace the ones who have left, a business will find an ever-increasing challenging in making up lost revenue and returning to a position of financial stability.

So the question is: “How to you trim the bottom line AND position yourself for growth?”

The answer is surprisingly simple and the first step is to evaluate where you spend your marketing dollars and what kind of Return on Investment (ROI) do you receive from each effort?

Far too often I’ve found that companies don’t have any real strategy for reaching customers. Worse yet, they tend to target the wrong customers or use the wrong advertising vehicle to spread their message.  In many instances, it is very much a ‘throw it against the wall and see what sticks‘ approach. Businesses regularly allocate a certain amount of funds to marketing, but lack a detailed plan on how to utilize those resources.

Here is a list of 10 common questions to help get you market more effectively:

1. How much money should a business allocate to marketing? The typical range varies depending upon who you talk to, but generally speaking 5-7% of total annual revenue seems to be what most experts recommend. So that means $5 to $7 of every $100 in earnings should be earmarked for next year’s marketing.
2. Are there any fool-proof marketing methods out there? The honest answer is no. Even the best researched, best intentioned marketing campaign is an educated guess. Focus groups, market research and expert experience can help narrow the margin for error and increase the odds of success, but it all comes down to how the audience reacts to your service/offerings.
3. Which is the best approach, branding or call-to-action advertising? It all comes down to what results you expect from your adverting. Branding advertising is designed to promote awareness – SuperBowl ads are typically branding ads and typically contain clever messaging or positioning statements. Branding ads are designed to keep your company in the public eye, but not designed to move specified amounts of product. Call-to-Action advertising advances a very specific action and benefit on the part of the client and is designed to get the cash register or phones ringing. A good call-to-action will do the following things 1) Sum up the value of the product with a tangible reader benefit; 2) Instruct the reader as to how to go about obtaining said product and 3) Instill a sense of urgency.
4. Which advertising vehicles work best? That wholly depends on the intent of the marketing,  but each vehicle has strengths and weaknesses. What I have found is that businesses often get caught advertising because the got ‘a deal’ – a sales rep called them with a special rate on airtime, or print space. This is not a reliable approach to marketing, nor an effective use of limited marketing budgets. The goal is to pair the right message or product with the right medium. For example: Newspapers are really good a limited-time or price point offers (call-to-action). They are not good at delivering results on image or branding advertising as they don’t have a shelf-life long enough to garner repeat views; Magazines however are just the opposite. They excel at branding and are less effective with call-to-action (C2A) advertising because their shelf life is often far longer, and C2A ads tend to expire before the reader can act on the offer. The limited lifespan of newspapers works for C2A because they are most often read the same day as they’re received whereas magazines may sit around for weeks or months before they’re opened. Radio and television can be used relatively efficiently for both branding and call-to-action advertising, but production costs and achieving the frequency needed to reliably reach the masses can be very expensive. On average a person needs to see or hear a broadcast spot 7-10 times before they actually realize they’ve heard the commercial. Phone books, in my opinion are almost a total waste of advertising money. They sit up-opened for months on end (especially with the advent of the the Internet) and even when they are opened, in most instances, people are searching for a specific name (i.e. they already know what business they’re going to use) and will not be casually leafing through trying to make a buying choice based on a yellow pages ad. Websites are a good area to spend money in your advertising (your actual web site), but banner ads and pay-per-click advertising doesn’t yield a great ROI. Social media is growing and is a great tool for branding yourself as a subject matter expert, giving you and your company added weight in terms of reputation, but like pay-per-clicks and banner ads, don’t expect a significant ROI.
5. How much time is there to attract the attention of the customer? Not much. In print, you have maybe one-half of one second to attract a reader’s attention. With television and radio, you have maybe a second or two before they switch to a different channel or hit the mute button (or fast-forward their PVR). This isn’t to say that you can’t be successful in reaching the audience with these mediums, but you have to do it the right way.
   
6. What’s the right way? In my opinion, the best way is to be clever, be informative, but be brief. Get straight to the point and show that you value the time of the reader. This means you streamline your  message to only the single most important communication point – don’t clutter up the message with a ton of irrelevant facts. In short, ditch the irrelevant … lose the picture of your kids and your dog (unless they’re the ones selling me a product, I don’t want to see them); cut out all the ego statements, the company history retrospective and ditch any photos which don’t directly support A) the product or B) serve as bait to attract attention; bullet-point your copy, if someone has to read through paragraphs and paragraphs of content, they’re not going to invest their time. Help them get in, get out and then on with their lives.
7. How much is too much to spend on any one project? That depends on your project and what kind of realistic ROI you expect. It’s not uncommon to see clients freak out over a production bill and get caught up on a single number. You don’t want to overspend on any project, but you also have to be realistic about what the results will be if you underspend. If you pay too much, you’ll never achieve a decent return. If you underspend, your effort will look cheap and that can have a significant and negative impact on your brand (public perception). It’s a balancing act and there will always be a certain level of give and take. But if you’re presented a bill for $1,000 for 500 sales brochures – but one single sale from that piece will not only cover, but exceed the total production amount – that’s a good return on your investment. If you spend $10,000 on a project and it would take hundreds or thousands of clients to cover the production costs, then it’s not a good ROI. Too often I’ve seen customers not proceed a project simply because of the initial cost, even though the realities of the ROI would indicate that only the smallest response rates (1%) would more than cover any of the production costs.
8. How much money will my marketing bring in? That’s entirely the wrong question to ask of your marketing investment. I get this question a lot from prospective clients. As I mentioned in #2, marketing is a best-guess endeavor so specific dollar amounts don’t necessarily have relevance. The numbers can be extrapolated based on expected response rates, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that achieving those numbers is an exact science. No, the right question and ultimate purpose for marketing is to bring people in the door. I’m going to write it once more for clarity. THE PURPOSE OF MARKETING IS TO BRING PEOPLE IN THE DOOR. It is not to move product. That is your job as a sales person. The advertising helps promote awareness and spread your messages to the masses, but once they step foot through your door, call you on the phone or land on your web page, that’s your turf and the success or failure to sell, promote or enable action rests squarely on your shoulders. If your customer service or your inventory quality isn’t up to snuff, no amount of marketing can make up for a shoddy product.
9. Can’t I just use word-of-mouth advertising? Word-of-mouth advertising is a very powerful tool. There’s no question, but it can be used for both good and evil.  You can  network and glad-hand people until you’re blue in the face and that can help bring business to your doorstep. But how much time do you spend to win that business? Is the amount of time you spend soliciting business taking away from running your company or improving upon your product or service? What happens when the people you speak to find your service or product to be of inferior quality.  Impress a client and they’ll tell three people. Wrong a client and they’ll tell ten. Yes, word-of-mouth can be a very powerful tool, I just wouldn’t trust it as the only tool in my arsenal.
10. An old adage in marketing is to focus on one medium and do it very well. Is that still true? Not in age of decreasing attention spans and multiple options (TV, Radio, Social Media, Video Games, Movies, Music, etc.) competing for our customer’s attention. The best approach is to have a strategic and multi-platform marketing plan in place. It doesn’t mean that you have to overspend or even increase your marketing budget (it may if your budget is unrealistically small), but it does mean that to reach the most qualified potential customers just at the moment they’re looking to act requires that you try and reach them in more than one area in their lives. They may hear your ad on radio, but it’s not until they see your ad in print or online do they realize that they’ve heard of you.

It is also very important to keep in mind that any advertising effort take time to gain traction; patience is very much a virtue. It takes time for repetition and awareness to fully seep in to the public consciousness. In my day I’ve seen far too many campaigns yanked after a week simply because the phones didn’t ring the very same day the marketing hit the street. If your marketing message is topical, if your distribution method is sound, if you are reaching the right customers, your marketing will be successful. It just takes time to get the word out. Marketing very much builds upon momentum and can grow stronger and stronger over time as long as your message is consistently reinforced.

Before you cut your marketing budget, take a long-term look at what’s really at stake. It’s not the short term success of your company, it’s the long-term ramifications that will really matter. The key to marketing effectively is to use your resources in the most optimal manner possible and to have realistic expectations as to the results. Examine what you’re currently doing and identify what is effective and what is not. If it isn’t working, trim it out of your budget. You can put that money to better use; either to help your bottom line, or to reinvest it into the marketing strategies that are generating results.

There’s a saying that moving to a new home is the best way to clean out the clutter in your life. If your bottom line isn’t what you want it to be, the answer isn’t to become homeless (i.e. eliminate marketing), it’s to streamline and cut out all the ineffective marketing and move to a new strategy that is more efficient and productive.

UPDATE – EXTRA READING:
An article from the Wall Street Journal discussing a similar topic.
A really great analysis by Gerard Tellis on the topic with data dating back to 1920 — good stuff.