Caboose Cut Loose

Or does it? Has anyone else noticed the tendency of big international brands to get their ads made in one market, and distributed to all?

Next time you see an ad for a razor, shaving cream, soap, or pretty much any toiletry, notice how you rarely see a person talking. You either see a person, and a voice over (dubbed for the local accent), or even worse, you see a person talking, and a voice that doesn’t fit the mouth!

I know of a particular shaving brand who shoot their ads with 3 actors: Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Its the same ad, the same script, shot in the same place at the same time, but they shift in the different race person. At least it is some amount of customisation, but its still pretty cheap.

For me, I am less inclined to buy these brands. If their personal product really is so suited to me, surely they could fork out the dosh to get an ad custom made to my demographic.

The same applies for small business. If you have a range of clients in different locations, or of different age groups, try to customise the ad to suite that particular market. People appreciate it, and they will respond!

Sorry all, I stopped blogging for a while due to the disgusting amount of spam I was being bombarded with. Everything is now under control thanks to my trusty nerd friend who fixed it!

Now, back to blogging!

This blog calls for a little audience participation. Grab a pen if you have one handy, or just think the answers to yourself within 5 seconds.

Don’t answer on opinion. Answer on marketing and common perceptions.

Ready?

Answer each of these questions with a brand who hold this thought in the market.

1. A safe car

2. Really fast food

3. Fresh food store

4. A prestige car

5. 24 hour courier

6. The coolest mp3 player

7. Basket ball shoes that give you extra airtime

8. Fried Chicken

9. An Australian airline

10. The original denim jeans

11. An ice cream store with lots of flavours

12. Affordable furniture

13. The best colour TV

14. A refreshing soft drink

Now answers vary on geography a little bit, but chances are, 95% of people would answer: 1. Volvo 2. McDonalds 3. Woolworths 4. Mercedes 5. Fed Ex 6. iPod 7. Nike 8. KFC 9. Qantas 10. Levis 11. Baskin Robbins 12. Ikea 13. Sony 14. Coke

This is not a coincidence. Its the result of branding. These companies have gotten so far because they have concentrated on ONE benefit, unique difference of their product, and drilled it in through all their marketing and advertising. Sure, Qantas might have really nice planes, Volvo might have good fuel economy, Ikea might have nice design - but that all comes secondary.

So why is it when you see a small business, they have tag lines like “providing your business with printing, graphic, and online solutions”?

You can’t be everything to everyone, AND expect to be a market leader. You need to think of the ONE word that describes what you do, and use 3-7 words to describe it. Avoid using words like “unique”, “specialists”, “solutions”, “leaders” and other overused cliches. These have lost all meaning. If you are that print shop owner, how about saying “we make you look good”, or “its where the pros go”. Maybe you can be a bit cheeky and tell people if Picasso wasn’t dead, he wouldn’t waste his time with oil and canvas - he’d go to you.

Think about the ONE thing your business does well and that your competitors aren’t saying, and say it well. Say it concisely, in plain english, and use it consistently for as long as its relevant. That is the one way to ensure when someone thinks “i need a good quality print shop” they think of you, before even looking in the yellow pages or google.

What is the purpose of your website? In business, we all tend to think our websites are for attracting customers, facilitating sales, as a large portion of our marketing strategies, and for collecting consumer data…

A successful website isn’t just a sales tool - it should be a service.

There are various statistics floating around the web stating facts like “the average person spends just 30 seconds on your website”. So how do you get these people to stay a bit longer, to recommend their friends to visit, and furthermore, to return themselves? It comes down to the old “what’s in it for me?”.

I recently spoke to a very switched on lady by the name of Tracey Voyce, from a company called Bloomtools. Bloomtools isn’t just an ordinary web design company, they specialise in optimising your website for your clients. So how can our websites make people return?

1. Give away something for free. No I’m not crazy, and I’m not joking. If you are a doctor - post free articles on staying healthy this flu season. If you are a marketing agency *cough cough*, give away some tips on how to optimise your marketing budget. The reason being? It gives you credibility. If they can see from your website before even speaking to you, that you know your stuff… they will be more likely to spend money with you. It also makes people think “if this is the stuff they give away free, the stuff you pay for must be fantastic!”. The best example of this I have seen in a long time is Ogilvy. Ogilvy has set up a satellite website providing all sorts of information for businesses to survive the recession. All information is free when you give them your details.

2. Keep a blog. Blogs are in vouge at the moment, but similar to the first point, they can often help to establish credibility, and provide clients with free insight into your business and the industry. Blogs don’t suit every kind of business though, and before you set up a blog, be sure that a) you can write reasonably well and confidently, and b) you are able to keep it updated, at least once or twice a week. Blogs can also help with your search engine rankings by providing more keywords linking to your site.

3. Newsletters. Give people the option of subscribing to your newsletter. Remember, a newsletter for a business is not like the ones you had at school, where they tell you who won awards and what’s happening in the school. Your newsletter should be more for your client, than a medium to blow your own horn. Corporate newsletters should contain articles, and again provide insights into your industry, highlighting trends and providing free tips. Sure, if you have won a major award - let them know, but the majority of the newletter needs to be for the client.

4. SMS alerts. SMS alerts are fantastic for a number of businesses, particularly those who either sell goods online, or involve an appointment with a client (such as a hairdresser or doctor). You can use these alerts to tell customers when there is a sale happening online - perhaps a VIP 8 hour sale. SMS reminders are fantastic for managing appointments. How much time could you save if instead of calling to confirm appointments, you just clicked a button?

5. Free tools. Can you provide free tools on your website to help your clients? Banks often provide tools like mortgage calculators, or tools to manage your budget, or compare credit cards or loans. This gives the client a reason to keep coming back to your site - and in the process, they see all your updates.

6. Customer login. Can your site give tailored services to a client based on information? Or, can it recommend products based on pages within your site they have previous looked at? Amazon.com is known for giving suggestions of books you may be interested in based on past purchases and pages observed.

7. Can you provide case studies of clients you’ve helped in the past? The more information you can give, including price points (if you are able to divulge) really gives clients an idea of what to expect - by way of relationship, results and fees.

8. Can you hold a competition to encourage more traffic to your website? So many contests now days involve “25 words or less why…” - but how many of these answers do you get to see? People actually enjoy reading this things, so why not post them as well as award the winner?

9. Can you conduct some kind of poll or survey on your website? Something that people are interested in participating in, and interesting in seeing the results of?

10. Could you have a forum? If people are discussing your product anyway, why not let them do it in a place you can listen in? If you sell house paint for example, why not have a home renovators forum where people can give advice on DIY jobs? Maybe you could even get experts in the field to contribute and answer questions?

These are just 10 very simple ways your website can go from being a shopfront to a service, which in turn, makes it a more successful website. So have a think about your website, and think about how you can best use it to serve clients, instead of just selling to them.

Get your website working for you and your clients.

It seems every small business has sent out some form of direct mail; a flyer, or a newsletter, or has had a landing page on Google. How often have you seen these items, had a glance and thought “well that looks good, I’ll store that in my mind” and never recall it again?

Chances are these were missing the “call to action”.

Writing my own promotional materials this week, it dawned on me how cliche so many of these sound. You have your “Call now for an obligation free quote”, or your “Click here to discover the secret to burning fat whilst sleep walking”, or even just “contact us for more information”.

What should your call to action say?

1. Tell the customer to get in contact with you (duh)

2. Tell the customer HOW to get in contact with you (email us, click here, call 1800…)

3. Offer them an incentive to do it (first chapter is free)

4. Stipulate a timeframe for them to do it in… (offer ends February 2009)

Now make this phrase about THEM! Avoid using words that sound laborious, like “learn”. To a customer, statements like this, as well as “to get more information” make them think of a encyclopedia being FedExed to their lap.

Avoid cliche’s like “unlock the secret”, which sound fraudulent.

Can you make your call to action fun? How about…

Ballroom dancing lessongs: “Come along and wear red in any Tuesday in March and get your lesson FREE”

Whatever it is, think of the benefit to your customer…

Web Designers: “Email us your details for a free assessment of your websites functionality, and discover how you can improve traffic, rankings and sales”.

If your product is pretty much exactly the same as your competitors, its up to luck as to which one a consumer chooses off the shelf right? Wrong.

It’s up to you to make your product different. If it’s not… then change it in some way that will make it stand out, or be more beneficial to then end user. Take bottled water. Can you honestly say that you can taste the difference between the 7/11 brand, Evian, Mt Franklin… or any of the other brands? Its all just water really. A lot of it now days isn’t even spring water, but just purified tap water. So what makes these brands different? Positioning, and packaging have a lot to do with it. Pricing also alters the perception of quality… but at the end of the day, its still just water.

That was the case until a Melbourne company, wanted to get a piece of the market, and launched their own brand… Another Bloody Water. With its unapologetic, no-frills label, it really stands out on the shelf. Its priced maybe slightly above the average, but its actually been awarded with media praise for being of higher quality than any other water on the market.

Quality isn’t what is moving bottles off shelves though. The marketing of it is.

Another fantastic example of how a product that wasn’t very unique has made itself stand out, is Hardy’s Wine. Back in my hospitality days when I was funding university (well the social side of it at least), Hardy’s wine was the house wine at 3 separate establishments I worked at. Its a cheaper wine, of reasonable quality… but its one of hundreds on the market. Hardy’s have struck gold with their latest packaging, teaming up with New Zealand company “Singlz”, and offering single serve bottles of wine.

Suddenly, Hardy’s wine is appearing in even more places… even Cirque du Soleil is on board with it. Its quick to serve, a generous size, plastic, yet doesn’t look tacky. Whilst the packaging isn’t faultless (the bottle contains more wine than the glass holds and doesn’t seal without the cup… so for the first few sips you are forced to carry a bottle in one hand and the glass in the other), it’s done enough to set itself apart from other brands for caterers and bars.

So if your product isn’t special… how can you make it special? How can you change it to be that little bit different, or to appeal to a different market?

A few small changes might triple your sales!

We all know the best publicity your business can possibly get, is a recommendation - word of mouth. What we forget though, is that a genuine recommendation from your employee, may count a lot more than one from a customer.

Pretend you are a fly on the wall, and you are hearing this about your business.

“My brother has a friend who works for (you) and apparently…”

Apparently what? Think of your employees. Picture them outside of work at a BBQ. What are they saying about your business? Are you an ice-cream shop and your employees are talking about roaches in your ice-cream cones? Or are they telling people that its low fat, organic, and even though they spend 30 hours a week around it, they still can’t get enough?

Are they saying your product is cheap and nasty and won’t last? Or are you a Mazda dealership with a staff carpark full of Toyotas?

You need to make sure your employees believe in your product.

-Keep them motivated, involve them in decisions, give them a sense of ownership, responsibility and pride.

-Never let them walk out the door unhappy with you, or your business.

-If you sell a product thats not too expensive - give them one, or give them a discount.

-If you are a restaurant, feed them - let them taste the product they are selling.

-Take every staff member “behind the scenes” into everyone else’s job.

-Show the teenage manning the front of your ice-cream store, how you make ice-cream.

-Show your employees what you are doing differently to your competitors.

-Always be seen to work at LEAST 10% harder than your employees or you won’t have credibility.

“My brothers friend works for Rogers Butcher and says that their meat is SO much fresher than Charlie’s”

I was out at dinner with a group of friends recently, when a mate turned to me and said “what is with the Sprite campaign?”. For anyone who hasn’t seen it around the place over the last 12 months or so, the Coca-Cola product has taken over numerous city billboards and bus stops, marketing their product with the “truth”.

Headlines for these ads include “Drinking Sprite won’t make you cooler” and “Your parents still do it”.

Sprite isn’t the first product out there to engage in self-slandering promotions. Australian Gen-Y worshipped radio station Nova launched campaigns about how bad their radio station is, shortly after launching the station itself. They frequently employ doctored (and original) clips of celebrities defaming the station, saying things like they’d “rather stand in front of a moving bus than listen to Nova”.

 So as my friend asked: why do they do it? Aren’t they meant to be telling us that their products are good?

 As far as I could see to explain, there are a few reasons why these guys are doing it.

 1. Gen Y typically doesn’t like being told what is “cool”. They are all about making judgement for themselves, and thinking they create their own image, are part of their own culture, and don’t conform to marketing.

 This is largely a crock. Yes they think that… but how many emo kids swarming around your local CBD think that they are “expressing themselves” and being “unique”. There wasn’t a TV spot saying, “Dress like a Muppet heading to a Manson concert” (this is a topic for a whole other blog!). They aren’t unique, and it certainly wasn’t them who decided that was the cool way to dress.

Gen Y is more likely to back the underdog around. Even though “Sprite” is produced in the same factory as the market leader “Coke” – the branding of it is being positioned to appeal to the values of today’s market.

 2. It’s refreshing to hear the cold hard truth. It’s amazing what advertisers would have you believe are the positive side effects of drinking brand A over identical brand B. Humans have evolved over the last hundred years to now have in built “crap detectors”. Ad’s now days are trying to be less transparent then their predecessors.

 If this particular billboard had said “Drinking Sprite will make you popular”, aside from it being rejected by the Advertising Standards Bureau for false advertising, no one would really pay attention. We are so used to seeing the benefit of every product that you just don’t pay attention anymore.

 3. Point number three – not only does it get you to notice it… it gets people talking about it. If old mate mister (or ms) account strategy and planning for Sprite reads this to find not only did someone notice it, but they brought it up for discussion at a dinner table of 10 people… from there someone blogged about it… well I dare say they’ll be calling Bonds for a fresh shipment of tighty whities.

So if you can’t honestly say what your product WILL do better than any other – maybe think about what it WON’T. I’ll end this with one of my favourite business positioning statements of all time. The Norman Hotel, a steakhouse in Brisbane advertises itself as “Brisbane’s WORST Vegetarian Restaurant”.

The first thing to know when in business, is who you are competitors are. This concept may seem rather obvious, but I recently did some consulting with a recruitment service. Without saying too much about her business structure, the idea was it was a low cost alternative to big-name recruiters, saving money by providing ads and short-listing candidates. I asked the director “Who are your competitors?”. She rattled off the company off whom she took her business model, before reciting the top 5 multi-million-dollar recruiting agencies in town.

Well…

• The exact same business  model - yes.
• The leading recruitment agencies in the nation - well yeah… okay… I’ll pay that. You can try and swipe a few of their clients - but the majority of their big clients are multi-million dollar businesses themselves, needing recruitment services on a scale that this new business model could not possibly provide.

Interestingly, she failed to mention the biggest competitor of all - Seek.com, Career One, the local rag, and anywhere else a business owner can publish their own ads, sift through applicants, and then hire their own employees. If all these small businesses are currently doing their own recruiting “successfully” - you need to give them the reason to change.

So who are your competitors? Say you are releasing a new brand of breakfast muesli - Who are your competitors? Kellogs? Sanitarium? The local homemade brand up the street? Sure… but what about toast? What about liquid breakfast alternatives? How about “Con” the Fruit man up the road? What about coffee?

Think about your competitors. Use your peripheral vision, and work out your primary, secondary and tertiary competitors. Understand exactly who they are, what they are doing, and why your product is better, then work our your marketing strategy to target your new audience accordingly.