Month: June 2010

Picture yourself…but where?

June 23, 2010

Begin at the beginning, but visualize the outcome. Decide who you want people to know you for and then build toward that goal. Here is an example.

My previous employer was doing many innovative things with their products (in fact, beating the 800 pound and 500 pound gorillas to these innovations by a year or two), yet the company was not known for its innovations. So we decided on a strategic use of communication to position the 80-year-old company as an innovator. Every press release, case study, article, white paper, web site page, product spec sheet, and PowerPoint presentation was developed to support this theme. My media outreach also centered on innovation. The tactics are simple: befriend the industry press, help them out wherever possible, invite them to your booth during trade shows, and ask for their feedback. When I planned to include an online news room in the new website, I asked the trade press what they needed in the site. Their feedback made the site one of the best in the business. But I digress from the innovation story…

The results of the innovation positioning speak for themselves. Within a year, the target audience awareness of us as an innovator increased by 50%. The company won three consecutive “Hot Product” awards in 3 years, and received several innovation award nominations. Now many of our products have a first name of ‘award-winning.’ Although it may take some time before this effort translates into sales, it definitely positions the company in the forefront of a dynamic industry.

Hit ‘em Where they Ain’t

June 18, 2010

An utterly priceless baseball quote is “…hit ‘em where they ain’t,” which is attributed to baseball immortal Wee Willie Keeler. At roughly 5’4” and 140 pounds (small even by 19th century ballplayer standards), Keeler was one of the smallest men ever to play the game; despite his stature, he was an incredibly resourceful hitter. Keeler’s advice to younger hitters was, “Keep your eye clear, and hit ’em where they ain’t” – “they” meaning the opposing fielders. He had an incredible knack for being able to hit the ball between fielders, pull to opposite fields, and bunt practically any pitch.

His hitting philosophy is also a marketing strategy that I have used to great success.

At my last employer, I constantly strove to stretch our meager advertising dollars. The print (and some online) publications were where the industry giants played, thus putting up high barriers to entry. So I remembered the quote from Keeler and pursued where the giants were not playing. The answer came in a relatively new online advertising player that was eager to get into our industry. They developed online portals specifically for our target audiences. Better yet, our competitors had no presence on these portals. We had the opportunity to beat them to the punch! The portals cost a fraction of the other media while providing us incredible visibility. They blasted all of our press releases to their subscribers, published our articles, and even helped us facilitate partnerships.

We enjoyed more than a full baseball season’s success in hitting them where they ain’t.

Only 57 channels? Is anything on?

June 16, 2010

Think back to the good old days. Remember when you used Twitter as the bastion of refuge from the clutter of other channels? Time to think about that channel plan again. Twitter has more than 120 million users and adds at least 6 million new ones per month. Even with only one tenth of its users actively tweeting, Twitter has not only become the clutter, it has basically become full to capacity. Marketers who choose to use Twitter are faced with a double whammy of a high noise level and (so it seems to this user) a high instance of site unavailability. So what is a marketer to do? Do you find another channel that is less crowded, or soldier on with increasingly crowded and unusable channels, or what?

Twitter is just a channel rather than a means to an end. Marketers cannot live by Twitter alone. The same can be said for Foursquare and even Facebook. Just because one of your TV networks (take GSN, one of my guilty pleasures, for example) may experience some overloading, that does not mean that your TV set is broken or your satellite/cable service is down. Switch to another channel and see what you get.

Think long-term about changes in your market and how your customer behavior will evolve, and try to forecast where they are going next. See if the channel still fits.

Call it what you like, but I call it…

June 11, 2010

This must truly be the end of an era. Or is it? General Motors recently distributed an internal memo, instructing employees to “communicate our brand as Chevrolet,” effectively stopping the use of the name Chevy when referring to their long established Chevrolet brand. Then, they backtracked. Claiming that their original memo was “poorly worded,” General Motors clarified by saying they wanted to use the name Chevrolet as they expanded into global markets.

This brings up a host of questions:

  • What is going on here? The names Chevrolet and Chevy have been pretty much synonymous for 100 years. This is one of the world’s oldest brands.
  • Is dropping the shorter name going to hurt the brand? Only a scandal of Toyota-like proportions could hurt such an established name.
  • What is General Motors afraid of? Is it is doubtful that anyone would mistake a similarly named company (OK, there is a Mexican restaurant chain with a similar name, but their food tastes better than the car) if they only used two of the three syllables.
  • Has General Motors done anything wrong? They did what nearly every major corporation has done at least once – issued a statement and then clarified. Clarity is good. The original memo was described by a General Motors executive as a “rough draft” that got out, so now they are stating what they really mean.
  • Isn’t it still an honor to have customers name your product? Many brand and company names (think IBM, KFC, and FedEx) evolved into their current forms because customers knew them by a less formal name. Shortening the name doesn’t cheapen the brand at all, rather it increases the customer’s affinity for and identity with the brand. Keep the brand top of mind, regardless of the syllables used.