What can marketers learn from comics?

What can marketers learn from comics?

Mar 18, 2016 | Communication, Marketing

For no particular reason I was watching some comedy on YouTube recently, top comedians plying their trade.

Great fun, but it struck me that there was a lot that we marketers can learn from the techniques that permeated all the routines I watched.

Comedians may be funny, but at heart they are storytellers.

We have all seen really funny jokes hit the floor in the hands of a poor storyteller. It is not  the fault of the story, it is the teller.

There was a clear pattern to the stories told by these comedians, irrespective it appears of the type of story they were telling. Jimmy Carr’s potty mouth stories had a similar  structure to  Jerry Seinfelds mother in law appropriate ones.

Some time ago I attended a corporate event that featured comedienne Fiona O’Loughlin as the after dinner speaker. She told her own story, her personal battles with alcohol,  an upbringing in Alice Springs,  early marrriage and a pile of kids. There was some pretty black stuff, but she had the room in stiches, and left a powerful message about personal responsibility.

Back to the structure of a successful story.

First,  every story has to grab your attention, so there is an opener of some sort, 5-45 seconds, that poses a question, makes a contestable statement, or paints some picture in the mind of the listener. An exemplar if you need another one is that almost every TED talk starts this way, with a device of some sort that grabs and holds attention.

Second, the story opens up, the comedian  weaves a narrative using all the tools of their voice and body, the dimensions of the stage. They create then relieve tension, ‘draw’ a series of pictures in the minds of the audience, only to pull them down to  show how ridiculous they are, almost mini- punchlines, and they are almost always personal, human, showing the foibles and idiosyncrasies of people. They reveal themselves and their emotions  to the audience, seeking to engage by having the audience relate to the story they are telling, winning the hearts of the audience with the struggles they are describing, reeling you in the with authenticity and ‘this could have been you’ narrative.

Finally there is the punch line, always something unexpected, providing contrast that evolves out of the story, but is not something that is obvious, it is this contrast that delivers the humour.

In telling the story, the comedian has allowed the audience to get to know them in an intimate way, you know how they think and feel, they have won your liking and respect with the authenticity of the story, and you trust them, because they have trusted you.

Marketing is no different, we have to tell stories about the products, how they fit into our lives to make them better, and they ways the audience can benefit.

Do that and your communication will work, fail to tell a good story, and it will hit the floor like a dirty wet  mop, and probably splash you in the process.

 

 

The secret sauce of marketing.

The secret sauce of marketing.

Mar 16, 2016 | Branding, Communication, Customers

 

The currency of marketing success starts these days with a simple word:

Attention.

How to get it, keep it and leverage it.

In the crowded world we are in, it is the secret sauce of marketing.

Every day we are assaulted by messages, millions of them, yet we actually ‘see’ just a tiny fraction.

In a world where our brains give us comprehensive and automatic filters, where even those that get through have a split second to make an impression and gain some of our attention, it pays to understand the means by which this process happens.

Automatic sensory cues.

When was the last time you completely ignored a gorgeous bird (if you are a bloke) wearing a short skirt and blazing red shirt?

Never happens right? That is because our brain is on automatic, it sifts the information coming at it in an unconscious manner. However, when something triggers one of the basic responses in our ‘reptile’ brain, the deepest most ancient part of the grey matter that controls just a few things, we notice. This automatic response was vital to the survival of a weak mammal being hunted by sabre tooth tigers, and thankfully survives to ensure we see the red shirt.

Reputation.

We often almost automatically trust things and people based on reputation. Tom Clancy brings out a new novel, and fans of the genre will buy it based on the experience and reputation of his previous books. In the past we also tended to trust authority, police and doctors for example, but the transparency of the last 25 years has almost seen that gone, we now make judgements on a wider base. Taking that one step further, we now put some weight on crowd sourced reviews as Amazon does with their rating and referral systems.

Recognition.

When we recognise something or someone, it grabs our attention. Walking through Sydney’s CBD a few weeks ago, paying no particular attention to anything, I unexpectedly recognised someone I had not seen for many years, walking the opposite way on the opposite side of Pitt Street. The sudden and unexpected recognition riveted my attention, I had to race across the road and accost him. (luckily my recognition was accurate or it would have been embarrassing). This also works inside businesses, the recognition of the familiar, weather it be people, processes or existing patterns of behaviour are powerful motivators of future behaviour.

Think like a customer.

It often surprises how little marketers actually look at their output from the perspective of those they are trying to influence. Stepping across and putting yourself into the shoes of the receiver in a way that enables you to see the material you are producing through their eyes, recognise and respond to the emotional hooks, feel urge to ‘connect’ that you are trying to build, recognise the  relevance and power of the offer or call to action. To some this capacity to jump into your customers persona comes as naturally as breathing, to others it remains a bridge too far no matter how hard they try, how much research they read. Finding someone in your team who has this capacity can mean a quantum step in the effectiveness of your efforts.   Thinking like a customer makes gathering attention much easier as you can see the cues your customer will respond to, and deliver them in a manner that creates and drives the attention.

This task, the drive to gather and leverage attention is one of the foundations of marketing success, understanding the triggers is essential.

8 reasons the opportunity for consumer goods SME’s has never been greater.

8 reasons the opportunity for consumer goods SME’s has never been greater.

Mar 14, 2016 | Change, Management, retail, Strategy

Think about it.

  • Many domestic competitors are gone, sent to the wall by combinations of the high $A, the power of the retail duopoly to call the tune with prices and terms, house brand expansion, and poor management.
  • Coles and Woolies have lost some of their grip as Aldi makes inroads, and some of the independents like Ritchies continue to compete effectively in local markets, and access to food service, ingredient and alternative retail becomes easier.
  • Consumer brand loyalty has been disrupted by the disappearance of some of the favoured brands, offering opportunities to forge new brand loyalties
  • Marketing expenditure can now be highly directed, and its effectiveness measured and continuous improvement be applied.
  • The costs of the tools like the analytics required to do effective category management, a data intensive exercise are  getting cheaper and cheaper, and the skills needed to make sense of the data more available.
  • SME’s are recognising that collaborative actions are not verboten, but are in fact very sensible and cost effective. Making it easier, digital technology has removed one of the greatest barriers to effective collaboration, the inability to communicate.
  • SME management has also recognised that collaboration is strategically and operationally sensible to build comeptitive scale to enable long term prosperity, so there are potential partners around.
  • Export is easier, as trade barriers are dropping, and product niches are often global

None of this of course is of any value unless you have the cash flow, determination, and management capability to make the changes necessary. However, those that have survived the last 10 years are a robust bunch, now the pressure is off a bit, don’t make the mistake of taking a breather, get in there!

 

How to Design a winner by staying out of the way.

How to Design a winner by staying out of the way.

Mar 9, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

 

Few of us are designers, although most would like to think the contrary

Few things get stuffed up more than design, and it is normally because a good designer was nowhere near the project.

You did it yourself, or had the intern do it, the boss’s wife, or you went on line and got 55 alternatives for $99.97 and picked one with a pin.

Does not work, does it!

While running large marketing departments long ago  in my corporate dark ages, there were two simple rules:

  1. There was a rigorous process of the product managers doing what they were supposed to be good at, building a design brief based on the strategies, product value proposition, and profile of the target audience, and it was followed.
  2. Nothing went out without me seeing it, and if there were several options, the one I favoured least was normally the one that was chosen.

I am a very good and widely experienced marketer, but a crap designer. Fortunately for the many successful projects over the years I know my own limitations.

So, to the design brief, the heart of any design project.  Here is a short list of do’s and don’ts

Do:

  • Offer the designer a range of emotional words you would like the designer to communicate. If the product is a healthy food product, words such as “nutritious,” “fresh,” and “natural” are likely words, but if the product is a body building supplement, they are more likely to be “Bold” “aggressive” and   “masculine”
  • Ensure the designer knows as much as it is possible to know how the customer will select, interact with, use and dispose of the product when it is finished. The more the designer can put themselves in the mind of the primary customer the better.
  • Make sure you take a mock up or two into the typical outlet to see how it fares in its competitive habitat if it is a product that must compete for retail display space.
  • Leave the graphical elements to the designer, that is their skill, so don’t box them in by specifying fonts, colours, layout ideas, or any of your  preconceptions. However, if there are elements that are mandatory, such as a brand colour guide, or that will cause the rejection of a design such as using your photograph, it would be wise to ensure they were aware of the boundaries.
  • Test where possible. Digital products can be subjected to all sorts of A/B tests and they often throw up amazing results, but in any event, be prepared to experiment, and improve with the benefit of the insights gained.
  •  First impressions matter, particularly when the impression is by someone with some empathy for the category. When running those large marketing departments of FMCG manufacturers, I used to ensure that all the women in the place were exposed to the designs, as they were more representative of the typical buyer than the men in the department.
  • Finally, and most importantly, the design has to tell a story to the buyer, it must communicate what the product does in a split second, and why they should buy it.

Do Not:

  • ‘Crowdsource’ the preferences of friends, co-workers, and particularly your partner beyond the “which do you like” question. Going one more and seeking advice on how to fix the shortcoming they see is asking for trouble.
  • Stick with a design that once in the market is clearly not working. We all make mistakes, the skill is in recognising them early, acknowledging, fixing, and moving on.

 

As a final word, do not do the design yourself, it will most times be rubbish. Design is a fundamentally important and often abused part of the process of delivering value to a customer. Short cuts almost never pay off, they end up costing heaps in rework and lost opportunity, and keep the list of Do’s handy.

5 ways to avoid brand prostitution in FMCG

5 ways to avoid brand prostitution in FMCG

Mar 8, 2016 | Branding, Category, Customers, Marketing

The primary tool used by retailers to attract customers is the discount prices that they offer on their suppliers products, largely funded by those suppliers.

As you read all the literature and case studies on brand building, and reflecting on my own experience, the last thing you want to do is indiscriminate price cutting to build volumes. Deep and regular discounting is a sure way to murder any long term position of the brand as anything other than cheap and nasty.

I have yet to see “Develop the brand to  be cheap and nasty” in a strategy document.

However, promoting your product, as distinct from stand alone price cutting is a potent way to get trial, and any brand building exercise  contains measures that  encourage and reward trial; setting out to turn trial into habit.

It is a delicate balance, generating trial and confirming to customers that  the product is delivering value for the non promotion price, when the discounted price rolls around every few weeks.

So how do you combat it, when  you  have so little control over the retail interface with consumers?

Not easy, particularly when to retain shelf space, discounting is mandatory, and often the  suppliers have ceded control of their promotion timing and type via  trading term agreements.

In effect the retailers do what they want, when they want, with your products to build their revenues and margins, and charge you for it.

In other words, they are able to prostitute your brand in their battle for market share and margin.

How do you break this cycle?

Not easy, and not without risks, as retailers can always delete your products and put  something else in the space, and increasingly this is a housebrand.

The answer is in several parts.

Make the CEO the senior  product manager. Too often, the boss is too busy to attend to the details of the sales and marketing programs, and conventional management wisdom  is that you leave the detail to those responsible for the outcomes.  However, abrogating responsibility is very different from leaving the details to the functional management. The boss must be engaged in the battles with retailers. Such engagement delivers certainty that you are serious to the retailers, and assures your people that the boss has their back if it goes pear-shaped.

Have a plan to manage the customer as well as the consumer.  It is essential that you have a plan actively supported by the CEO around the supply chain challenges of building of a brand. This means that the CEO needs to support the sales and marketing management in the implementation in the face of retailer pressure, removing the retailers opportunity to play the  ‘go to your boss’ card.  Obviously, any marketing plan needs to address the consumer  you are talking to, what they are looking for, and how you are delivering that value to them, or they will fail, but most in my experience miss the explicit references to those who control the choke points in the distribution chain.

Regain some control over trading terms. This is easy to say, but enormously hard to do, and is impossible in one negotiation round.  To the extent that sales success requires distribution in the two gorillas, you need to be very aggressive and smart about wresting back some of the control of the on shelf promotional and price decisions. Branding success requires that you deliver consumer trial in a competitive environment, followed up and consolidated by the reward of great value, which is way more than a cheap pick-up price. Just going along with a retailer delivering a low price to consumers only rewards brand prostitution by the retailer.

Manage your data. You need data on which to base all your decisions, as debating challenging questions with a retailer on the basis of what you think is not good enough.  Assembling data that demonstrates the ROI on promotional activity across a variety of time frames and consumer centric parameters is essential. This requires both scan data and external consumer and social data to be combined and analysed. Not an easy task, and certainly not without cost. However, if your volumes are dependent on promotional pricing without the ROI knowledge offered by data analysis, you have already lost.

Consumers need to be engaged. Outside the price, you need to be communicating with your consumers, supporting the value proposition in every way possible. This is now possible through a multitude of channels and tools not dreamed of just a few years ago, and these need to be used. However, if  you have the budgets, old fashioned advertising, so long as it is good advertising that communicate clearly the value of the brand, still works.

Yeas ago as a young product manager, I was a (minor) part of the team that built Meadow Lea margarine into the dominating market leader in margarine. Meadow Lea peaked above 20% market share, well over 3 times its nearest competitor, in a crowded market, at premium prices. It was just margarine, a great product, but hardly worth that sort of dominance until you remember that we were busy congratulating mothers for using it for the benefit of their families health and  happiness. I have not seen any numbers in a long time, but I have also not seen advertising for a long time, so I bet Meadow Lea is back with the pack, only selling on promotion, at discounted prices, and the parent company, which took a short term view of marketing, went from being a successful large company to an unsuccessful way smaller one until it was flogged off to a Singaporean group.

Sad that.

We built a brand powerhouse, only to have it squandered.

As a final groan, just pre Christmas I went into Woolworths to buy the family Christmas ham. The only choice was one of a number of Woolworths house brands.  I went elsewhere, and found a really good ham from a specialist retailer, probably cost an extra $5, but was worth every cent.

I wonder if this experience is a portent of things to come, or just me being cranky.