If marketing is an expense, it's something that should be minimized. If it is an investment, well, that makes you look at it differently.

From a friend and client in the financial planning business, here are some fundamentals of investing. See if your marketing activities sync with this.

1. Accurately assess where you are today.
2. Clearly define where you would like to be (goals, objectives, etc.).
3. Identify the course that most effectively and efficiently get you there (remaining flexible in the process).
4. Align yourself with a professional familiar with that course to serve as your guide.
5. Allocate resources to areas or items that have historically helped others reach goals similar to yours.
6. Understand risks and rewards.
7. Maintain a proper time horizon in the realization of your goals.
8. Patiently stick to the plan and make slight adjustments as the industry or marketplace changes.

The only thing he left out was the principle of diversification. I will be speaking to him about this omission.

Of course, I am biased towards #4. #5 is also a favorite, but only once #1 & #2 have been established. All these things must mesh together.

The way financial investing works is very similar to the way your marketing investments work. If your money simply goes away, it's an expense; if it returns to you, it's an investment.

Make sure you're making an investment, not just paying an expense.

Labels: management, marketing, planning, strategy

One of our printing partners recently sent me a link to a graphic design shop's website. My friend had never seen the word creative used as a noun before. But that's not what struck me about the site.

Check out the opening lines: "We believe effective creative comes from critical thinking and that thinking cannot, and should not, be constrained within arbitrary parameters." That line is ironically followed later by this: "Simply stated, we are a jargon-free agency."

Huh?

It's not the big words that confuse me. (Give me a little credit, please.) I just wonder how people write stuff without ever thinking about how it reads. Especially to someone who doesn't know them at all, who is gathering their first impressions about this firm and the people who work there.

But as overwrought as that web copy is, it has been topped. I've seen much, much worse in several industries.

When you write and speak -- in marketing, in sales, in customer service -- speak your customer's language. Impress them with your command of their needs and your own solutions, not the far reaches of your extensive personal lexicon.

Labels: bad habits, customer centered, marketing, messaging

In the first couple years of Fox Marketing Group, I introduced a program giving local restaurants exposure in local hotels, updated weekly. I piloted the idea in two different communities, and then sold it after a couple years. Fun times.

The manager of a national steakhouse chain ran the same 10% or 15% discount coupon every week, never changing it. As I checked in from week to week, response from the front-line staff was encouraging: "We're seeing a lot of these." But to my dismay, the manager eventually dropped the program, saying he didn't think he was getting enough takers to justify the effort.

This came as a surprise not because of the feedback from the cashiers, but because of something that had happened only two weeks earlier. During my rounds to area hotels one afternoon, I pulled into the local Days Inn and saw a gold mine: A tour bus had just arrived, filled with tired and hungry travelers. In addition to leaving the "Local Flavor" in the usual places, I boarded the bus and asked if anyone wanted a deal on their meal that evening.

I was met with thunderous applause. 40 passengers, new to town, were ready to eat.

Just an hour or so later, I discovered where they had chosen. Cruising by the steakhouse, I saw the bus in the parking lot and a line extending outside the restaurant doors. This steakhouse was getting business!

But the manager didn't know it. The cashiers would see the coupons, push a standardized discount button, and pitch the sheets in the trash. The manager never saw them.

If you don't have a system for tracking where your customers are coming from, including feedback from your front-line staff, start now. Customers are precious. Find out how they got to you.

Labels: advertising, bad habits, marketing, messaging, research

I just ran across some research from Rutgers that reminded me of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs behavioral theory. (Yeah, this is heavy thinking for a Monday night, but there's no football on TV.)

Data collected over the past couple decades shows that environmental concern trends higher in periods of general economic strength. When there is job growth and a sense of economic security, people feel free to worry about things that less directly impact their daily lives.

The hierarchy of needs holds, for example, that people aren't too worried about their self-actualization when they're fighting to merely feed themselves for the day. "Higher" goals and ambitions don't kick in until the more basic needs are met.

When times are good, they have the energy and mental latitude to care about things higher up the pyramid like environmental consciousness.

The application for today, where the recent past has been a tailspin and the near future is uncertain at best, is to focus your messaging on your buyer's more basic needs and problems. Yes, if you're "green" or you offer some other self-actualizing benefit, that should come across -- but only after you've shown how you help them in ways that are a little closer to home.

Labels: advertising, marketing, messaging, research, strategy

Crayola means crayons. Crayola is the crayon king more than Google is the king of search or Coke is the king of pop. Crayola means crayons like Kleenex means facial tissue.

Over the past few years, Crayola has taken over more and more shelf space in the art and craft aisles. And from my vantage point, secondarily as a marketer but primarily as a parent of creative kids, they've done an excellent job of it.

The hot item for Christmas this year -- this year's Cabbage Patch Kid, as it were -- turned out to be the Crayola Crayon Maker. When the full line of 100+ Crayola crayons isn't quite enough, the new Crayon Maker allows you (or your child) to take the scraps and broken pieces to mix and match and make your very own new creations.

My poor kids still don't have one. They were sold out everywhere!*

In a smooth way, without sacrificing their landmark product line, Crayola now means more to the same set of customers than it did just ten years ago.

When you think of crayons, you think of Crayola. But now you can also find the Crayola brand on a much wider variety of creative product lines. A crayon maker by any other name may not trigger interest or a purchase, but because it says Crayola on the package, you sense that you know what you'll be getting.

I think that's what separates a typical product line extension from a "blue ocean strategy." Is it just a new product or service, or does it expand what your name means to customers?

What does your name mean? What else could your name mean to the very same customers? If it's something that solidifies and expands your relationship with those customers, make it happen!

* Christmas is over, and their birthdays are in June, August and September. I may have to simply splurge on this and just buy it as soon as I find one.

Labels: branding, creativity, differentiation, management, marketing, planning, strategy