The Marketing Agency Talk

“Marketing is what you do when your product is no good”

~ Edwin Land

I so, so, so disagree with this statement.

Coca Cola has a winning formula.

McDonalds is a fast food joint successfully run by kids.

Nike is doing it’s stuff everywhere.

Nokka connects people around the globe.

Fedex lives to deliver.

Let’s not talk about whether the acids in Coca Cola will wreck havoc in your tummy and if McDonalds’ burgers and fries cause obesity. Let’s not debate if Nike really has a winning spirit, if Nokka is the best or if Fedex’s overnight delivery rate is at 100%.

Let’s just discuss this: Should these wonderfully successful companies stop marketing and advertising because they have already proven that their products and services are good?

My humble opinion is they should carry on marketing and advertising, and step up if they can. Why?

So that consumers know more about their products’ and services’ goodness. That will allow the consumers to make an informed decision.

So that they can continue to sell and make a profit and feed those thousands and thousands of people in their payroll and thereby keep the economy wheels moving in these hard times.

Like John D. Rockefeller said, “Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.”

I just followed 2 links from ReallyNiceVacations.com to SuperiorRugs.com. The first link text I clicked was “cheap rugs” and it led me to it’s home page. I followed another link text that said “area rugs” and it brought me to a “clearance area rugs” page.

I understood that the writer was highlighting the fact that we can find affordable rugs at this website. However,  to use “cheap rugs” on a company whose name is SuperiorRugs is a little weird to this marketer here. Cheap can be an attractive and  luring word but it can be derogatory as well. It is a word to be used carefully in all marketing message - verbal or written. In fact, I recently recommended a friend to amend his self-introduction elevator speech. He always called himself a freelance safety auditor. Freelance means you work independently but regrettably, a large part of the market sees freelancers as cheap labors offering services at average quality. You and I know that’s not true but a lot of people felt differently. We hired lots of freelance copywriters and designers to help us during peak hours but we don’t call them “freelancers”. We called them “independents” and we encouraged them to do so too. “Freelance” and “independent” - Which word instill more pride and more values? I would substitute the word “cheap rugs” to “clearance rugs” as it is used at the rug company’s website. The latter is by far a more positive word.

The cheap rug section is aptly called “Clearance Rugs”. In no way did Superior Rugs gave the impression that the rugs listed there are of less superior quality. They were just clearing off old rugs to make way for new ones.

Consumer like to pay cheap price but they don’t like to buy cheap goods. Next time, when you are going to hold a sale,  give a reason for the sale - clearance for new stock to come in, best price for early birds … whatever. You can offer a cheap price but never ever give the impression that your product/service are of cheap quality. Go see SuperiorRugs’ site, it did not use the word “cheap” but the prices are (at the clearance pages)!

We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see it, but every week you have to mow the lawn.
- Andy Travis

Everyone who works in the creative realm know that … or should know that.

Seldom will one single advertisement make a product and its owner a household name. Even if it did, it will take other marketing efforts (advertising, promotions, public relations, sales, customer relations management) to sustain that glorious position at the pinnacle. Sadly, many marketers fail to understand that marketing and advertising is a continuous process. You may stop marketing a while to take stock what’s happening. And, when you got an understanding of the situation, you will have to re-look and possibly re-work the strategies and tactics to meet new demands and new challenges. LIke the Energizer Bunny, marketing should be kept going, going, going and going - even during hard times. In fact, when the goings get tough, the tough will be the one that is moving ahead, not just moving along.

We are in recession … and some might even said we are in depression because the gloom on our faces and the lightness of our wallets said it all. So, to spend or not to spend, is indeed the question. To live, we got to have air and water to survive. In business, marketing and advertising are just like air and water. You might get terribly sick with little air and little water but you won’t die. Don’t choke yourself to death by not marketing and advertising during this tough time. Seek out those methods that costs little or no money. You know, words of mouth, email marketing, referral program … …

Just do it.

What helps people, helps business.
~ Leo Burnett

Isn’t that profound? Many of us developed and created a product/service to sell in order to make a profit. In our own urgency to sell to pay our own bills and create our desired lifestyle, we totally omit to serve and contribute. We forgot that our product/service is supposedly to be a solution to the buyers’ problems. Orvel Ray Wilson put it as “Customers buy for their reasons, not yours.”

In order to serve and contribute, our product/service must truly offer values, benefits and solutions. However, that is not enough in today’s world. The old saying depicted that If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest, the public will somehow beat a path to your door. However, in today’s world, we received no less than 4000 (or was it 40,000) message per second. This means, we are not going to remember everything and we are only going to buy what we remembered, knew, favored and resonated with. So, if you want to have buyers in sufficient and significant numbers, you would better construct a highway, or a few highways in order to serve, contribute, sell and make a big profit.

One of the highways is better communication. First and foremost, you must know how to sell yourself and your product. I just learned an important lesson that I shouldn’t tell others something like, “I’m working in an advertising agency”. Why? Read this post from Vivienne who in turn learned from T Harv Eker.

I once used the word “obsolete” in a headline, only to discover that 43% of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline I used the word “ineffable,” only to discover that I didn’t know what it meant myself.
~ David Ogilvy

Amateur copywriters might make the mistakes of using big words to impress their clients. And, wonders of wonders, the clients were duly impressed to pass the copy with flying colours. What hurts is the results. When their target audience cannot understand one word here and one word there, the likelihood that they give up reading the rest of the copy is strongly. Why lose the entire forest because of one tree? To me, talk simply and write simply to get the message across is the best.