In just 15 words (plus a two-word cheer), our newest client summarized why he hired us—and why in tough economic times it’s wise to crank up direct response marketing: “Since the market has retracted, the only option we have is to take market share. Yippee kayaee!”
Steve Cuno
No one likes being told they’re wrong. Starbucks keeps failing to learn this lesson.
In the company’s early days, CEO Howard Schultz wouldn’t let baristas make lattes with nonfat milk. Why? Because they don’t do it that way in Italy, that’s why. Any customer who wanted a nonfat milk latte was just, plain wrong.
In time, Schultz realized that his customers didn’t care how things were done in Italy. They wanted nonfat milk, even if it meant finding a competitor who would give it to them. Which they did, in sufficient numbers to make Schultz yield.
Fast-forward to today. In these tough economic times, it has become clear that the public finds a cup of Starbucks coffee to be rather expensive. A smart marketer might respond by adding value or finding a way to lower price without lowering quality. But, no. Instead, Starbucks has launched an ad campaign telling the public they’re wrong. Not only is a cup of Starbucks not expensive, the ads attempt to say, it’s worth it! (If you detect a bit of oxymoron in that line of reasoning, you’re not alone.)
How much market share must Starbucks lose before, once again, consumers voting with their wallets show who’s boss?
—Steve Cuno
Readers know that I strongly I object to the marketing of flimflam products. I’m lucky to live in the US, where I can write about it with safety. The following, from today’s edition of Swift, the online newsletter of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), is alarming. For more information about Simon Singh or the JREF (of which I am delighted to be a member), please visit www.randi.org. —Steve Cuno
Simon Singh is Appealing
Swift
Written by Phil Plait
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 14:16
In a recent Swift post, guest blogger Naomi Baker wrote about friend of the JREF (and TAM London speaker) Simon Singh, a skeptic and journalist who literally wrote the book on “alternative” medicine. Simon also writes for the UK newspaper The Guardian, and in a recent article he said that the British Chiropractic Association made claims that were “bogus”.
The BCA was not happy with this, of course. But instead of providing any evidence that what they claim is not bogus - evidence, in this case, which does not exist for reasons you can probably figure out yourself - they decided to sue Simon.
In the UK, when someone is sued for libel, it’s up to the defendant to prove their innocence, rather than up to the claimant to prove harm was done. The effect of this is one of chilling any potential criticism; it can be dangerous for media to call to task an organization like the BCA (or any pseudoscientific claimants) because of the chance of getting sued. This has put quite a lot of pressure on Simon, as you can imagine.
Worse, a judge in a prelimary hearing ruled for the BCA, saying that Simon’s use of the word “bogus” indicated fraud (that is, intentional deception) on the part of the BCA, when it’s clear from the original article that is not what Simon meant; he meant simply that the BCA was wrong, not acting fraudulently.
But here’s the very interesting bit: Simon is appealing the ruling.
This is a very brave decision on Simon’s part, as this could be a drawn-out, expensive, and emotionally draining exercise. However, it’s the right thing to do.
We at the JREF support Simon’s decision, and at a recent support meeting for him we issued the following statement:
We at the JREF support Simon in his quest for justice. It’s clear from his writing that his intent was not to claim that the BCA knowingly commits acts of fraud, but that the BCA is nonetheless incorrect in their claims of the efficacy of chiropractic. Simon is, of course, correct. Furthermore, the ruling, as it stands, would produce a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to question the claims of anyone, including pseudoscientists. Whatever path Simon chooses over this issue, the JREF will be there, and to the best of our ability we’ll have his back.
Many other people feel the same way. In fact, the UK science outreach group Sense About Science is helping Simon considerably, and have created a page called Keep the Libel Laws out of Science, which has a list of other supporters, as well as statement of support for Simon signed by many luminaries in the fields of science and journalism. They also have a button you can download to display on your blog or website, too.
Show your support: tell people you know about this, write about it, and use the social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, what have you) to let others know. Simon needs our help, and a strong public showing is a good place to start. There will be more info on how you can help on the Sense About Science website as well.
Copyright © 2009 James Randi Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
A down economy is no time to indulge brand malpractice. Yet with GM on its last legs, marketing charlatans are moving in fast to do just that.
The mountebanks have proposed rebranding GM. Fair enough. Except, they have no concept of what a brand really is. Rather, they have proposed that all GM needs to do to revitalize itself is adopt a new slogan. Ready for the candidate slogans? There’s, ”Driving a new day.” Or how about, “GM. The New Road.” Or, “GM. American-crafted.”
People get paid big bucks for this crap? (Meanwhile, we little guys, who work hard to come up with provable strategies, struggle by. Alas.)
Never mind that the average junior high student could have come up with better lines. What GM and the brand flimflammers fail to understand is that a slogan is not a brand. A brand is what a product is and does, and the values its company lives.
GM sales haven’t declined because of a crappy slogan. So what on earth makes anyone believe that a new slogan will fix the problem?
Changing a slogan and calling it a re-brand is like having the date of your dreams decline a night out with you because of your personality, actions and values; so you change your hairstyle in hopes that he or she will like you better.
For an article on what a brand both isn’t and is, send an email to steve@responseagency.com.
—Steve Cuno
How many of you agree:
—That Wendy’s isn’t fast food?
—That pork really is white meat?
—That whatever movie is currently being promoted as “the comedy event of the season” … really is?
Steve Cuno
A generally accepted axiom in our industry states: “Clients get exactly the marketing they deserve.” When I was new in my career, I wondered about that one. Today, some 30 years later, I understand and endorse it. Ironically, no one is better at sabotaging a sound strategy than the very people who depend on its success.
If it’s true that you get the marketing you deserve, here are some rules for deserving the marketing you want:
1. Give one person in your organization the power to approve advertising. Tell this person that passing the work by a committee or even “showing it around” is punishable by death. If you don’t trust this person to make good decisions, you are either a lousy manager or you have hired the wrong person. (If it’s the second and you do nothing about it, then the first is also true. More on this in Number 4 below.)
2. If policy demands that more one person review the agency’s work, or if you simply cannot resist showing it to others, give the agency access to all decision makers and influencers. Otherwise, changes will be dictated by the uninformed, depriving the agency of any opportunity to talk sense to them.
3. You’re the client, so you have the right to accept or reject your agency’s work and to order revisions. But first, listen. Ask your agency a lot of respectful questions that begin with “why.” For instance, before saying, “I don’t want a brochure in this direct mail package,” you might ask, “Why do you recommend a brochure?” (Note: If your agency says, “Because we think it will work,” or, “Because it’s such a great brochure,” that’s not good enough. Hold out for an evidence-based answer.)
4. If you must revise everything your agency produces, you are a lousy client. Period. Now, you may also have hired a lousy agency, but that doesn’t let you off the lousy-client hook. Good clients hire agencies for, and let them exercise, their expertise. Should it turn out they’re not experts after all, a good client replaces them with a shop whose people are, and stays out of their way. Keeping an agency and rewriting their work is like getting a watchdog and then making it sit back while you bark at intruders yourself. (Paraphrased from David Ogilvy.)
5. Sorry, but your gut doesn’t know squat. Insist on evidence-based, not opinion-based, marketing tactics. An agency should be able to tell you how they intend to track a recommended strategy in order to evaluate its viability, or how that strategy has performed when measured in the past.
6. Give your agency real objectives. ”Increase awareness” is not an objective. If you must establish an awareness objective, make it specific, like, “Increase awareness among target market from 10% to 12% by September 30.” Here’s another example of an objective that leaves no place to hide: ”Increase sales from 31,000 units/day to 32,000 units/day while reducing cost-per-sale by 2¢ by the end of Q2.”
7. Treat your agency with kindness and decency. Funny thing about that. When our creative people are away from the office and their minds wander, clients who treat us nicely are the ones to whom our thoughts drift. They get our best proactive thinking. Oddly enough, they also end up spending less on agency services, since things tend to get approved faster and with fewer revisions.
—Steve Cuno
What works in marketing is not a question of opinion. It is a question of what the empirical evidence shows.
I recall an ad writer’s objection to a car dealer’s fast-talking TV pitchman. “As if,” she wrote, “anyone believes that such an approach really sells cars.” I hated the pitchman too, but I also happened to know that the dealer was selling lots of cars because of him.
You may not like a tactic, you may be skeptical of it, and your focus groups may hate it. Fine. But what works is a question of fact that is independent of your opinion.
Now, there is no law that says you must implement a tactic that you don’t like. If you don’t want to put a P.S. on your direct mail letter, more power to you; leave it off. But be careful not to embarrass yourself by saying, “In my opinion, putting a P.S. on a sales letter doesn’t work.” That’s like saying, “In my opinion, the moon is too far way to influence the tides on Earth.” You see, the laws of gravity and motion don’t really care what you or I think.
Neither do the laws of the marketplace.
—Steve Cuno
Some years ago, the school bully’s attention found its way to my kid. It had gone on long enough, so I complained to the school. The bully’s mom leapt to her son’s defense with this telling remark: “I’m sick of all the parents in this school saying that my kid is a bully. He’s not.”
Hmm. Had she listened to herself from the vantage point of a third party, she might have realized that the desire to defend her own had rather clouded her judgment.
Let’s not be smug. We all do it. Even we marketers find ways to defend our work, successful or not, come hell or high water. At those moments of paramount stubbornness, the last thing we will acknowledge, to ourselves much to less to anyone else, is that we are being irrational and defensive.
An encounter with a certain not-for-profit organization illustrates. They contacted us to help with fundraising. In our second meeting, I asked for clarification: I couldn’t quite figure out their mission. The organization’s executive director fumed, “I’m tired of everyone telling me our mission is unclear. It’s perfectly clear.”*
The moral: You cannot defend your baby and be rational at the same time. Every now and then, step back and listen to yourself from a detached point of view.
—Steve Cuno
* I declined their business, though not on that basis alone. The more we listened to the executive director expound that “perfectly clear” mission, the more odious we found the organization to be. They not only oppose the separation of church and state; they want the church to be in charge. Not just any church, of course, but the one the executive director belongs to. Further, the church wouldn’t speak for itself. The E.D. would determine policy from his perception of its interests. This was not the first time that I walked away from a client or prospective client. But it is the only time that I have left thinking, “I hope they fail.”
Common method for wasting 30 seconds of expensive air time: Dramatize what’s wrong with the competition, instead of what’s right about you.
If you spend 25 seconds making fun of how bad the Other Guys are, you’ll have 5 seconds to display your logo and say little more than, “We’re not like that.”
You show what you’re not at the expense of showing what you are. ”We’re not like that” isn’t much of a message. You could have spent all 30 seconds giving people reasons to buy from you. Instead, you wasted valuable time giving them reasons not to buy from someone else.
Steve Cuno
During Lent, fish filet sandwich sales at McDonald’s usually go up, all by themselves.
In hopes of giving this natural phenomenon a boost, McDonald’s placed a video on YouTube featuring Frankie, the ubiquitous, plaque-mounted singing fish.
Over a million people and counting have viewed the video. McDonald’s is calling it a success.
Not so fast.
The video’s objective is to generate fish sandwich sales, not to garner viewers. True, it can’t generate sales without garnering viewers. Equally true, lots of viewers may indeed lead to lots of sales. But, right now, it’s too early to tell if that will happen.
Perhaps you just rolled your eyes and said, “Duh, anyone knows that awareness ensures sales.” If you did, I have one word to say to you: “Edsel.”
McDonald’s would do well to await results at the cash register before heralding the spokesfish as a marketing breakthrough. (Hopefully they or their agency maintained control groups—though I bet they didn’t—in order to determine how many people bought because of YouTube, versus how many would have bought anyway.)
My point: If your ultimate objective is sales, it’s important not to mistake the metrics of advertising penetration for success.
Steve Cuno