Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at the Spokane Ad Fed monthly program. The subject of my presentation was (most appropriately) the Evolution of the Super Bowl Commercial. Here is the powerpoint from that presentation for your perusal. I look forward to your feedback.
If you and I found ourselves standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to change, and it struck you to ask me, “What’s the one thing I could do that might help make my Social Media efforts more successful?,” in the few seconds I had to answer before the light changed, my response would likely be this:
“Think like a Business-to-Business marketer.” 
Traditional marketers often struggle with Social Media because it doesn’t operate by the traditional rules we learned regarding marketing, advertising and promotion. Traditionally, we were able to buy attention. To be successful with Social Media, we have to earn it.
The problem with looking at Social Media through traditional marketing lenses is that it’s too seductive to view them primarily as additional channels to deliver brand messages. To get out of this mindset, it might help to approach Social Media with the mindset of a B-to-B marketer.
What do B-to-B marketers do that B-to-C’ers could learn from? Consider this list:
1) B-to-B’ers build relationships. B-to-B purchase decisions generally take much longer than B-to-C because there are multiple people or teams that need to have buy-in. Throwing your message out once or even a handful of times won’t be enough to close the sale. Building a relationship built on trust will.
2) B-to-B’ers focus on providing solutions, not just making sales. They get to know their customers and what their needs really are, then use those needs as a platform for conversation and conversion.
3) B-to-B’ers enable the customer to have her own “period of discovery.” In a B-to-B environment, generally the customer comes to you after she’s done a good deal of homework. She’s already “short-listed” you. The lead time or “courtship-phase” demands the marketer to constantly engage, communicate and maintain a dialogue with the prospective customer.
4) The B-to-B’er rewards loyalty. Once B-to-B clients make a purchase decision, they tend to be more loyal and spend more money. Marketers who dedicate more of their resources to keeping current customers happy generally do quite well in the B-to-B environment.
5) B-to-B’ers enable their customers to get input from others. Successful case studies are important. First-person testimonials are important. Actual customer experiences are important.
6) The B-to-B’er understands that not all buyers are the same. Customers may come to them for different reasons, and different stakeholders in the organization are looking for different things. A one-size-fits-all pitch is unlikely to work across the board. Understanding the whims and agendas of all stakeholders allows the B-to-B marketer to directly address each need.
7) The B-to-B’er enables prospects to find out as much about them as they can. B-to-B purchase decisions are made in a very logical, deliberate way with a strong ROI case to justify them, whereas often B-to-C purchases are based on emotion. Prospects often must justify their purchase decision to investors, bosses, or boards of directors.
Social Media, managed thoughtfully, can help any organization, whether B-to-B or B-to-C, better engage with its customers in each of these ways.
A brief side note: regular readers of this blog are familiar the importance of generating and publishing quality content on an ongoing basis. I will be hosting a three-hour workshop on Developing Killer Content on April 28th through Greater Spokane Inc.’s BIZ Street series. You can get more information on the workshop and register here. Or just drop me a line.
Posted by Mickey
New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Social Media, Uncategorized, customer experience
Funny how a scene from a movie set in the 1930s can help provide a lesson for audience engagement in the 21st century.
This 2½ minute scene from Jean Shepard’s classic holiday film “A Christmas Story” provides a great example of how a “worst practice” can kill a community of followers.
Nine-year-old Ralphie is a devoted follower of the “Little Orphan Annie Radio Hour,” and listens to the program religiously. In an effort to build a community of dedicated followers, the program’s sponsor allowed kids to become “members” of a special club: “Annie’s Secret Circle.” Club members received an official-looking letter and a special decoder ring which allowed them to decipher coded messages that were broadcast at the end of each program.
Only Official Club Members with the official decoder ring could decipher these messages. Once you opted-in, you were part of a community of kids who also followed Little Orphan Annie and her adventures. You could identify fellow members by the ring they proudly wore. Suddenly, you had a connection to kids you didn’t even know through membership and shared allegiance to a radio show. Only this community had the ability to decipher Annie’s secret messages.
While this was a great way to build and engage a community, the sponsor ended up blowing it. As demonstrated in this scene, as Ralphie was decoding his first much anticipated secret message (hoping no doubt to discover the location of a hidden treasure or find a clue to next week’s adventure), he was let down to find the coded “messages” were no more than “lousy commercials” from the show’s sponsor, Ovaltine. In frustration, he threw his decoder ring away.
This scene dramatizes an important point in engaging your audience. Once you have a community, be sure the content you send them is relevant, useful and wanted. If your content becomes about “you” and not about “them,” you’ll see followers drop off and fall away, just as Ralphie did.
From a content standpoint, it always helps to be thinking in terms of the next engagement. Filter your content by asking, “Is what I’m about to send enough to get my followers to come back the next time?”
If you heard that a TV spot for a fashion discounter was banned by some stations, you’d be excused for thinking it was because it was deemed a bit too sexually suggestive.
However, stations in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Baton Rouge, Birmingham and Seattle (Seattle?) rejected this spot from K&G Fashion Superstore for being a parody of a 911 call:
My question is, how can you not tell it’s a put-on? The transcript running over the call and the over-the-top pitch of the caller’s voice are dead giveaways. And when she pleads “He took my money and all I got was this dress,” I mean, come on.
The fact that these TV stations took it upon themselves to censor this ad because of their fear that “some folks out there won’t get it or might be offended” is a classic example of the “30% Rule” I blogged about a few months back (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=102586). In their attempts to protect “some of us,” the stations made a decision for all of us to “opt out” of this communication.
Sure, some folks might not get it or think it’s in bad taste. (If that’s the only criteria stations used, they could justifiable ban every beer, pharmaceutical and weight loss spot out there, not to mention some of what shows up on the evening news).
I’m not defending the spot on the age-old “slippery slope” grounds, or even because I think it’s a worthwhile concept. Rather, I’m bringing it up because actions like this run totally contrary to the transparency demanded by today’s media consumer.
The Internet has retrained all of us to understand that the consumer is in control. And any attempt at controlling the communication (and censorship is the ultimate means of trying to control the communication) isn’t kosher in this day and age.
Like it or not, the viewer is in control. Let her decide what’s appropriate. If she doesn’t get it or is upset by it (and some will be), let her take whatever action is deemed appropriate. But minus some sort of tangible violation of decency standards, don’t make the decision for her.
Or she might just ban you.
Posted by Mickey
When I say “beverage bottle,” you no doubt have an image that comes to mind. Maybe it’s clear. Maybe it’s colored. Maybe it is plastic, or maybe it’s glass. Maybe it holds 12 oz. or 24 oz. But chances are you see the same basic shape and form as everyone else.
Everyone except for Stephan Linfoss, that is.
Linfoss is an entrepreneur in Finland who is having us rethink what a bottle is all about. And by rethinking the bottle, we’re forced to rethink everything associated with it—from what goes in it to how it is disposed to what its role is in our lives.
Linfoss describes his bottle as being “bagel shaped.” It is round, made of clear environmentally-friendly plastic and is reusable. Plus, it functions in ways ordinary bottles cannot. It can be stacked in the refrigerator, saving space. It can be attached to a belt or purse. But the most compelling feature of the Linfoss bottle is how it connects with people.
People are drawn to it. People want to touch it, inspect it, and see how it works. It puts a smile on people’s faces. And they can’t wait to show it to others.
If I were Coca Cola, I’d buy Linfoss’s design in a New York minute, no matter what the cost. Because as soon as consumers see that cool bottle at the point of sale or in the cold box, it’s game over. This bottle could do more to affect the sales of Coke (or whatever new product the beverage maker chose to put in it) than a $20 million ad campaign.
This design is a wonderful lesson in approaching a situation with a “beginner’s mind.” Linfoss points out that specialization and insider knowledge can be the enemies of breakthrough thinking. “You don’t want to have too much knowledge of the industry as a designer,” he says. “(Knowledge) prevents you from flying high enough.”
The bottle as we know it has existed pretty much in its current form for more than 150 years. If it didn’t exist in its current form today, we very well would approach the problems of “creating a commercial beverage container” quite differently. Given the technologies and materials available today, if you were asked to design a container from the ground up, you could easily arrive at the conclusion a bagel-bottle would be far more functional than a standard shaped bottle.
If something as simple and ubiquitous as a bottle can be “evolutionized,” then you have to accept the possibility that almost anything can be. And that—the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is another, better, more engaging way of providing the most mundane piece of our offerings—is the whiff of possibility that gives us permission to dream about what would happen if we “set our conventions and knowledge aside” and truly created.
Posted by Mickey
One of the things I love about technology is that every so often, you’ll come across something so amazing, intuitive and unique that adds real value to your life. I came across one of those things last week, in the form of a web site called Tabbloid.
If you’re like me, you probably subscribe to a number of interesting blogs and e-newsletters. Problem is, after a while, my inbox gets a little unruly, and it’s a challenge to keep organized or make sure I haven’t missed anything. Hence Tabbloid. Tabbloid is a way to manage your incoming blogs, e-newsletters and other RSS feeds. You just type in the URL, set the intervals you’d like to receive them (you can even specify the exact time of day) and Tabbloid emails you a customized PDF of the most recent editions of your favorite blogs, organized much like a newspaper. You can read it on your computer screen (with the embedded links still live) or you can print it out for on-the-go reading.
So who is responsible for Tabbloid? None other than Hewlett-Packard. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? HP, whose core competency is printing the written word, coming out with a great reason to print the written word. Is Tabbloid going to be responsible for the sales of thousands of more laser jets? It’s debatable. But what it does do is give users a very good reason to acknowledge that paper is still an imperative part of the office environment, regardless of all the talk of the “paperless office.”
An ongoing challenge in marketing is to continually find interesting, unique, surprising ways to execute your Brand Vision. Sort of like HP did with Tabbloid.
Posted by Mickey
One of the things we continually preach to our clients is to discover the inner meaning of your product or service. This has little to do with its functionality or serviceability. It is more about the emotional need you answer for your customer.
The AMC television series Mad Men gave us a perfect example of this during its season one finale. Part of the story arc involves the ad agency’s new business pitch to Kodak. The client has just introduced a new technology that will revolutionize the age-old slide projector. And the client, who is predictably seduced by this new technology, wants to lead with it, and explain to the consumer how this new system will make showing slides so much easier and convenient for them.
Don Draper, the agency’s creative director, has a different take on how to sell the product. You can see it here in this clip:
Technologies change. Features are added. Product lines evolve. Competition changes. But the core reason for doing business with you—the emotional need you are satisfying—need never change. Honda came out with a campaign in the early 70’s (via Chiat/Day) around practicality. The tag line was “We keep it simple.” While Hondas have changed quite a bit over the last 35+ years (you probably wouldn’t even recognize a ’76 Civic), if you ask, “Quick, name a car that stands for practicality,” Honda will likely be one of the first few responses from most people.
Customers do business with people (and companies) that “get” them. And there’s no better way to demonstrate that than to understand and answer that deeper psychological need.
Posted by Mickey
Bio: Mickey Lonchar opted for a career in advertising after many assurances it would not require any math or heavy lifting. Having spent the better part of two decades creating award-winning advertising with agencies up and down the West Coast, Mickey currently holds the position of creative director with Quisenberry Marketing & Design, a full-service advertising and interactive shop with offices in Spokane and Seattle, Wash.
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