Jim Morrison and the importance of relevance

20 September 2011 2 Comments

From my NETT blog:

What are the most important factors to consider when you’re communicating ideas to people? How do you get your message across successfully?

From my days as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines through to my current work presenting digital marketing messages or lecturing to students, a few common themes have emerged in terms of what works consistently.

Actually, I exaggerate – there is really just one fundamental rule in successful communication: make your concept relevant to your target audience.

This is expressed as a couple of acronyms:

• WIFFM – what’s in it for me?
• WSIC – why should I care?

If you can understand what matters to your audience and work out how to relate your message to their concerns, you’ll get your point across.

This principle isn’t limited to written, visual or verbal communication messages: it extends to the communication of ideas, and can include the dissemination of those ideas through a variety of media.

Take music, for example. My favourite band of all time is the Doors, led by the late great Jim Morrison. The Doors tapped into the Zeitgeist of the 1960s with music that protested against traditional mores.

Their sometimes dark messages about love, fitting in and pushing back against parental barriers struck a chord with young Baby Boomers who were just starting to flex their muscles and question the structures of the world that they were inheriting.

Read the full story

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New wine, old bottles

22 August 2011 Leave a Comment

From my NETT blog:

Despite working with new technology every day (or maybe because of it!), I like to collect old wares, and my idea of a good weekend includes some time spent trawling through antique and vintage shops.

A recent acquisition was a set of books on ‘modern business’ produced by the Alexander Hamilton Institute back in the 1950s. I was, of course, drawn to the volume on marketing. On leafing through it, I was surprised by how relevant much of the information still was, after nearly 60 years and several seismic shifts in marketing and selling.

Here are a few snippets from the book (with my annotations):

“Marketing concerns itself with all those business activities which begin in the producer’s shipping room and continue until the goods finally come to rest in the hands of the ultimate user.” (This is a timeless reminder as many people equate marketing with just the advertising and promotional aspects of the process. This broad spectrum definition is today even broader as digital and social media marketing extend the process past the delivery of goods and into an ongoing lifetime relationship with customers.)

“The satisfying of human wants depends to no small degree upon the personal and subjective wants and desires of individual consumers.” (This is increasingly relevant as we have moved from the age of mass marketing, which was gearing up when that book was written, to today’s trend toward mass customisation.)

“The basic law of marketing is the ‘law of convention and revolt’. A new mode of life may be created or established, but it will last only until a new style is introduced, often by quick substitution.” (When that was written they were talking about seasonal changes in fashion; now a style can go in and out with days. It’s not strictly a business marketing example, but how long did the planking craze take over public consciousness – was it a couple of weeks, or even less?)

Read the full story

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A healthy market opportunity

16 August 2011 Leave a Comment

I was interviewed recently on the latest developments in digital pharma marketing. Here’s an excerpt of the story from the HotHouse blog:

The rise of digital in all its forms – Internet, mobile, social media, online video – has fuelled the shift from selling and marketing products to selling and marketing services, as consumers have replaced manufacturers at the centre of the marketing universe.

Everything from product development to promotion to post-purchase evaluation is today built around understanding and meeting customer needs.”

This is abundantly apparent in an area like healthcare. From a product-focused sector based solely on convincing doctors to prescribe medications based on scientific evidence (and a few educational dinners), drugmakers are building portfolios of services aimed at patients and doctors around their brands, helping healthcare professionals tackle issues like patient compliance and health education as direct promotion takes a back seat.

Big numbers

I discussed the implications of these trends with healthcare digital strategist (and HotHouse content producer) Ray Welling in this month’sHotHouse podcast. And while the growth of online generally as a medium and a marketing tool has been impressive, the numbers for healthcare are truly staggering.

Read the full story

Filed under Australia, Business/corporate, Content, e-commerce, e-health, e-marketing, Education, Healthcare, Media/journalism, Pharmaceuticals, Social media, video Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Target those who need you most – NETT blog

17 November 2010 Leave a Comment

Our politicians have shown they could learn a thing or two from small business when it comes to marketing their wares.
You can be the best at something, but if people don’t know about it, that fact won’t get you anywhere.
The federal election brought home for me the importance of positioning and promotion when you’re marketing your business. The shambolic campaign and aftermath showed that you can be running the only western economy to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis, which should be enough to get you elected a saint, but if you can’t sell your accomplishments – and you let your competitors dictate the agenda – you will be severely spanked.

Policy waffling, backstabbing and leaks didn’t help, but history tells us that Australians give a neophyte government a second chance, even if it’s made mistakes. For the government to have so many runs on the board, the election should have been a walkover. To my mind, Labor’s biggest problems were a lack of firm positioning and an inability to sell itself to its customer base – uh, I mean the electorate.

These principles also apply to running a small business. It’s not enough to be the best-in-class for service, delivery, reliability, range or innovation; if your customers and potential customers don’t know it, you won’t survive.

The first step in this process is positioning. You need to work out what you’re best at; what your salient attribute or point of difference is, and why it’s meaningful to your customers. It’s only worth focusing on a defining attribute if:

Read the rest of Ray’s column here: http://nett.com.au/blogs/target-those-who-need-you-most/162.html

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We now resume regular programming

1 July 2010 Leave a Comment

Yikes – a digital content consultancy that doesn’t update its blog. 

I’ll avoid all the obvious analogies such as the plumber who doesn’t have time to do the plumbing at his own house, and instead just point to some of the things that have kept me away from the blog:

Also the hundreds of assignments, group projects, essays and exams marked for my uni classes this semester. Onward and upward to more frequent  blog posts!

Cheers, Ray Welling

Filed under Australia, Business/corporate, Content, e-commerce, e-marketing, video Tagged with , , , , ,

Consumers to companies: give us entertaining online video

5 February 2010 1 Comment

eMarketer’s recent report on the use of online video by the consumer packaged goods sector has uncovered some interesting results, such as the numbers showing that people are expecting to be entertained by companies as much as they are expecting to be marketed to.

Across nearly all of the categories, entertainment rated as high as marketing (see above). Solving problems and offering incentives to buy were the highest rating expectations, on average.

The survey, conducted among nearly 600 US new media users, demonstrates the strength of online video and shows how consumers’ perceptions of marketing and advertising are changing, as the line between content and promotion becomes increasingly blurred.

“Digital video content, whether delivered through a computer, mobile phone, handheld device or TV monitor, has the potential to ignite two-way conversations between consumers and brands,” said Tobi Elkin, author of the report.

According to an eMarketer summary of the report: “Putting a hard number on the dollars spent by consumer packaged goods marketers on online video content is difficult, as outlays are not included in measures of paid advertising spending. Assessing its effectiveness is likewise a problem for marketers. The same metrics issues that bedevil marketers trying to assess the effect of online advertising on their brands also plague the ability to evaluate the performance of video content.”

Reprinted from the Zazoo blog

Filed under Advertising, Business/corporate, Content, Social media, video Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

What’s that smell? It might be your campaign

17 June 2009 Leave a Comment

From the Zazoo blog:

Chris Abrahams, a US & European-based social media and conversation marketing expert who I interviewed earlier this year for a HotHouse podcast, has written a cleverly-titled article in Ad Age this week: “Global Web Means Your ‘Fart Jokes’ Can Be Heard Out of Context“. (I know my wife won’t believe me, but honestly, I am not writing about this just because it allows me to use the word ‘fart’ in a blog post!)

Anyway, Chris cites the example of Grey Advertising Germany’s recent campaign for the Doc Morris pharmacy chain, which advertised condoms by implying that if Hitler, Bin Laden and Mao’s parents had used Doc Morris condoms, the world would be a better place today. (View the ads here). Even though the ads aren’t online ads per se, reaction to them as insensitive, racist, etc. etc. has spread quickly via social media.

Chris points out that “That’s the way it is with humor – sometimes you nail it, sometimes you bomb. Humor is powerful in both directions. A simple allegory for old-media folks who still don’t get it: Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends in your rec room = low risk. Standing up and telling a fart joke while drinking with friends at someone’s wedding party = high risk.

“With internet advertising and PR, you are always at someone’s wedding party; you are never safely behind closed doors.”

He advises advertisers, marketers and PR flacks to remember “On the internet, you are always talking to the whole world, whether you intend to or not; be cognizant of who your message will offend and decide deliberately if you are willing to offend them; and if you must offend, have your mea culpa machine ready to go before you pull the trigger.”

Filed under Advertising, e-marketing, Social media Tagged with , , , , , ,

This week’s social media links

24 May 2009 Leave a Comment

From the Zazoo blog:

Here are a few interesting stories about social media that have been published in the past few days:

Social Media Benchmarks: Realities and Myths

“….many clients still ask about benchmarks. They ask, ‘What are good CTRs, CPCs, CPMs, etc. so I know how my programs stack up?’ Well, there’s good reason those benchmarks are hard to find. Lacking a reliable source, I ran my own analysis over the last three years and came up with many eye-opening results…”

Australian Social Media Statistics Compendium

“With so many new social sites emerging it is very important for marketers to have Australian specific intelligence to determine which channels are the most attractive to pursue as part of your marketing strategy….”

How Accurately Can You Gauge the ROI of Social Media Tactics?

“Marketers are under constant pressure to measure everything they do. The result is often a default to tactics that are more easily and accurately measureable, regardless of their effectiveness. This is especially true in social media marketing which often requires qualitative measurement rather than quantitative metrics that are more familiar to online marketers….”

Online Marketing’s Evolution

“What’s the future of interactive advertising? Executives from interactive agencies and marketing technology tech companies tried to answer that question at two conferences this week in New York City. Discussions ranged from the challenges of working in social media, risks for agencies in using pay-for-performance models, one online marketing sector that’s thriving, and Amazon.com’s crowdsourcing initiative. Here are some takeaways….”

Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium, Report Likens Twitter To TiVo: More Hype Than Reality

“Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it… But for all the media industry’s hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks’ analysts, likely never will. The report, “How People Use Social Media,” finds that social media is having a profound impact on the way people connect with each other, but that it’s not becoming a very meaningful way for people to connect with brands, or advertising promoting brands….”

The Social Data Revolution(s)

“In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever. What are the implications for marketing?….”

Tags:

Filed under Advertising, Analytics, Australia, e-marketing, Social media Tagged with , , , ,

The importance of being open-minded

19 April 2009 Leave a Comment

Reprinted from the Zazoo blog:

I know it’s hard for most companies to acknowledge that they are no longer in control of their marketing, and that their customers now strongly influence what happens to their brand. It’s harder still for them to take active steps to give control to their customers, particularly when stories of what has happened to companies like Chevrolet, Skittles and Domino’s abound.

Believe it or not, it hasn’t been that long that companies have used the Internet to let customers actively play with their brand. I was reminded of this when I read recently about ‘celebrations’ of the fifth anniversary of Subservient Chicken, that creepy guy in the chicken suit with garters who reponds to user commands to reinforce the message that you can ‘have chicken your way’ at Burger King (Hungry Jack’s in Australia). The guys who came up with the idea have written a huge screed about the origins of Subservient Chicken which makes interesting reading.

The most important factor leading to this iconic online campaign was that the client was open to left-of-field ideas. As The Barbarian Group director Rick Webb writes, “To be perfectly frank, even as we were building the thing, I never believed it would launch. We here at TBG are insanely good these days for convincing clients to take risks. But in 2004, there was no way we ever could have sold the Chicken through. Sometimes getting the green light is as important as the idea. Most of the time, if you ask me.”

Of course, the big question is, did it sell more chicken for Burger King? To quote from AdWeek: ”About a month after the sandwich debuted, BK reported that sales had steadily increased an average of 9% a week. Since then the company has seen ‘double-digit’ growth of awareness of the TenderCrisp sandwich and ’significantly increased’ chicken sandwich sales. And the TenderCrisp does sell better than the original sandwich.”

Yes, you can make some mistakes by trying new things. But you might also take on that concept that powers your brand to a new level – and have fun doing it. Go on, try something new this month!

Filed under Advertising, Business/corporate, Content, e-marketing, Social media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Read the story, get the T-shirt

29 May 2008 1 Comment

Chris Kerns writes on the Zaaz blog about a funky new cross-promotional trend he noticed on CNN.com – on stories with “out there” sort of headlines, you can order a T-shirt with that headline. “Bikini-clad baristas shock customers” is the example quoted in his posting. Kerns says it freaks him out and makes him wonder about what they’re doing to the CNN brand. Personally, I think it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s because I once worked as a sub-editor (my goal in life at one time was to be a headline writer for the Daily Telegraph), but I love quirky headlines and would consider buying shirts with my favourites emblazoned on them. There’s of course, the classics such as “Man bites dog” and “Headless body in topless bar”, and others such as one from today’s paper: “Drink too much and you might feel ruff-ruff” (for a story about a beer for dogs). What headlines would you put on a T-shirt? I might give a bottle of a classic dry white from a remainder sale to the best one submitted.

Filed under e-commerce, e-marketing, Media/journalism Tagged with , , ,

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