How to ensure your copy does not get read.

How to ensure your copy does not get read.

Jul 21, 2017 | Communication, Marketing, Small business

Copywriting is easy.

That is what you tell yourself, after all, you can write, you are a professional, very used to communicating, and doing it successfully.

My sister is a writer, and every now and again she grabs one of my posts over which I have slaved (yes, it is OK to have family subscribed) and goes into what I call her ‘Teacher mode’

Out comes the red pen and professional editor and she rewrites my posts.

They are subtly altered, so the intent of the post is clearer, makes a greater impact on the reader, and ends up being way, way better.

It galls me a bit that it is a skill beyond mine,  but on the other hand, she makes me feel better by telling me she could never dream up the topics and angles that I do, all she does is polish it a bit.

We are inundated with copy, it comes at us at all times, through all our devices,  and now is increasingly visual  as a means to fight the war for your attention. However, like most things the volume going up does not have any real impact on the quality, if anything the average has dropped as we become ‘do-it-yourselfers’ in order to keep the volume up.

The headline is the most important element of copy in any piece. If you fail to cut through, catch attention, and create an urge to read on, it does not matter how good the rest is, it will not be seen.

There is piles of advice around on how to write a great headline, most of it pretty good, but also so much that we tend to get tunnel vision, and forget most of it, so following are 4 basic things I see continuously that ensures I do not open a piece.

Talking about yourself.

Nobody cares about you, except perhaps your mother, or in my case, my sister. They care about themselves, their lives, and their problems. A good headline reflects those needs, pain points, and offers help to a specific group that you wish to communicate with, and at  the very least, creates interest.

If you are a dentist, do not talk about how modern your equipment is, or how many degrees you may have, address the reason someone  may be looking for a dentist. They have broken a tooth, their child has a crooked bite, or they have a toothache that needs attention.

Using jargon.

Every industry has jargon, it acts as shorthand for insiders, so if you want to grab the attention of your competitors, use the jargon they understand, but if you would rather catch the attention of those who might want to act on what you say, avoid it like the plague.

Last week I saw a headline that promised: ‘to deliver a sophisticated customer centric e-commerce solution to SME’s’ . How much better would it have been if the headline simply promised to make it easy from small businesses to get paid.

Showing how clever you are.

For your potential customer, clear beats clever every single time. It may not get a chuckle from your mates in the pub after work, but so what, they are already your mates, and not required to pay your bills. The most common offender is the use of a pun, never as funny in a headline as in the pub, followed closely by the use of ‘digital shorthand’ such as ‘gr8’.

Allowing grammatical and spelling errors.

Perhaps it is just my age, but a spelling or grammatical error in a headline or sub head ensures I do not open it. Not only does it offend my sense of what is right, it demonstrates that the writer is either too stupid to understand the basic rules of written communication, or that they have so little concern for my time that they did not make the effort to get it right. Why would I read it in either case?

The difference between ordinary copy, and great copy is a big bagful of money, and a lot of effort, experience and specialist skill.

 

The value of an engaged employee.

The value of an engaged employee.

Jul 14, 2017 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

We all talk about the necessity of ‘engaging employees,’ but rarely truly achieve it, or see it in others. However, when  we do see it, we just know in our guts that we are looking at the way we would always like it to be.

Yesterday I spent 90 minutes in a suburban McDonalds store killing time between appointments, reading the daily rag, drinking an excruciating coffee, and fiddling with the language in a client report. All this time I watched a young bloke in the store make everyone he came into contact with feel special, even great.

He was just a casual employee, whose job it is to clean the tables and mop the floor. He did this, but he also did much, much, more. He opened the door as people were coming towards it, he high-fived the little kids, he helped a lady fold a stroller after extracting her baby, he joked and pranced, and he did all this with a huge smile on his face.

Every single person he interacted with smiled back, and had a word, he threw some light on everyone’s day.

As the store manager delivered a meal to the person at the table next door, I observed to him that this young bloke was worth much more than they were paying him, to which the manager responded, ‘We give him as many shifts as he wants, and we love having him here’

Despite the excruciating coffee, and other sometimes annoying human traits on display from time to time at Maccas, I know I will be back at this one, and hoping to see this young bloke loving his work, and making the day of others again.

 

 

 

Sustained Marketing success requires managed mindset change

Sustained Marketing success requires managed mindset change

Jul 12, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Marketing

We marketers, and usually sales people talk endlessly about putting ourselves in the shoes of those to whom we are communicating, and seeking to serve. It is absolutely right that we do, but then we stuff it up.

We do that by the way we define the industry we are in.

Go to any network meeting, and I (almost) guarantee nobody will define the industry they inhabit from the perspective of those they are seeking to serve.

They are lawyers, or Architects, or Insurance brokers, and so on. None will define what they do by the outcome for their customers.

Examples of the great miss-definitions abound, but two stand out.

Kodak was in the late nineties one of the great successful companies sitting on a mountain of cash, dominating an industry they defined as ‘Film’. They were so successful their advertising slogan persists to this day, we all know what a ‘Kodak moment’ is, well all over 40 do anyway. In 1975 Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera, which Kodak patented, and later collected billions on the royalties until expiry in 2007. They even commercialised the technology for Apple under the brand ‘Apple QuickTake’, and even then failed to see the writing on the wall. In 2012 Kodak was made bankrupt, although it has since emerged as a different company.

Blockbuster, what a Lulu of failed strategic sight that is, although it is always easy with the benefit of hindsight. At their height, Blockbuster had 50 million members worldwide, thousands of stores, and were a critical link in the movie money making chain. In 2001, the fledgling  Netflix approached Blockbuster, seeking to sell their business into them, and run the online part of Blockbuster, for just $50 million. CEO John Antico had been looking at ways to experiment with on line delivery, and supported the idea. He had made some changes to blockbuster,  like removing the profitable late fees that penalised customers, but failed to get the deal with Netflix through his board, and it ultimately cost him his job. His successor led the business into oblivion by bowing to  the board, reintroducing the hated late fees,  and allowing the power of incumbency, and the aversion to change, to prevail.

You do not have to be a huge business to be caught by this definitional challenge that pervades the way you think, unconsciously driving the decisions you make. A client of mine is a printer, a modest sized family business that has been around for 60 years. They see themselves in an industry that has been significantly disrupted by digital, and while there is still plenty of printing being done, the volumes are modest compared to those of a decade ago, and  the prices and margins are very slim. They acknowledge they are printers playing a role in the communication industry, but they still think and act like commodity printers. At least however, they have made a start in the mindset change which drives behaviour, and which eluded Blockbuster and Kodak.

Blockbuster saw themselves in the video rental industry, not as a part of the entertainment industry to the end, and Kodak was in the film industry, not the memories industry, until they weren’t.

Marketing Myopia, a term coined in 1960 by Theodore Levitt in his seminal HBR article of the same name remains alive and well, just harder to recognise.

 

 

 

 

The marketing flip, with pike & twist.

The marketing flip, with pike & twist.

Jul 5, 2017 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

The marketing degree of difficulty has exploded, making getting a good score  exponentially more difficult.

There used to be a few TV and radio stations, newspapers and magazines by which to reach potential customers, and supply them with the information you thought they needed to buy your stuff.  It was mass marketing, with little to no ability to customise, personalise, or engage.

The name of the game was scale.

Scale of capital to control the means of communication and mass produce products for sale

Scale of financial resources  to afford the advertising costs demanded by the communication owners

Scale of markets, mass consumers

Scale of intermediaries like supermarket chains, and suppliers of capital and equipment.

Scale had all the power.

In 15 years, less than half my working life, marketing has flipped.

Individuals now have all the power

Marketing has to be personalised, one on one, or it will be ignored

Media channels are now virtually infinite, and the cost can be modest to free

Brands are only as good as the last delivery of value to the individual

However, the objective remains the same, just as with the fancy dive. It is to go through the surface with as little splash and disturbance as possible, a good old fashioned, well executed and relatively simple swan dive can achieve that objective as well as the fancy risky, and hugely complicated combinations of tricks.

Next time you are contemplating a complicated marketing dive with a pike and twist, consider the benefits of simplicity.

 

Will Amazons venture into book stores rewrite history?

Will Amazons venture into book stores rewrite history?

Jul 3, 2017 | Branding, Change, Marketing

I love books, thousands of them infest my home, and I have spent years of my life browsing. I may be one of the last “heavy consumers’ of books, and particularly coming towards Christmas, my local Dymocks and Berkelouw’s which have so far survived, welcome me with open arms.

There is a physical tactility to a book that you cannot get on a ‘device’, no matter how great the design, which has the potential to generate an emotional attachment.

Perhaps it is just me?

As a result of this I am on the Dymocks mailing list. Every month or so, I get an email outlining the deals on the best sellers, books of interest, and new releases.

Now, I do not mind the odd romance, or light ‘love and discovery’ adventure, I have probably read 2 or three in my time, but they are not my normal fare.

Nowhere near my normal fare.

Despite a couple of emails, and even a phone call to them indicating my absolute lack of interest in their hit list, and observing they have access to a significant amount of purchase data should they choose to use it, I still get this crap filling my inbox.

Meanwhile Amazon is opening book stores, bricks and mortar book stores.

Unthinkable a few years ago that having disrupted and almost destroyed book stores, they then venture into them.

Shades of the Washington Post turnaround under Jeff Bezos

They will be doing all the stuff in bricks and mortar stores that Dymocks, and all the other retailers now disappeared had the opportunity to do, but lacked the foresight and understanding of their customers to be able to do, despite having 15 years head start.

Book stores have a place, long live real books, and the stores that sell them, I guess they will be branded ‘Amazon’, and Jeff will keep laughing.

 

 

 

Is it schizophrenia or just something in the cactus?

Is it schizophrenia or just something in the cactus?

Jun 30, 2017 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing

For years consumer markets have been relentlessly commoditised by retailers who hold the power over the distribution, and who not unreasonably, have sought ways to divert the proprietary margins available from manufacturers pockets into their own. Short term thinking, but that seems to be the world we live in.

Largely retailers have won the game, and branded FMCG products are now becoming an increasing rarity, and mostly where they survive, it is on the back of trade deals and residual strength of brands built by smart and visionary marketing in yesteryear. In liquor there are still many brands, but unbeknownst to most consumers, many of them are just housebrands infused with the wine industry hyperbole that seems to be expected.

The impact on category innovation is yet to be really seen, but I suspect it will stumble further, as by my observation of the shelves, it has done over the past few years.

There however, is the schizophrenia.

Every now and again, a product emerges that runs against the trend.

Consumers are increasingly concerned with the integrity of the supply chains that deliver products to their mouths, so on the fringes there are some very expensive products, usually in alternative distribution that use long lists of adjectives to describe their products: organic, hand- made, all natural, crafted, you have seen them all. Occasionally they are genuinely ‘new’ products, but mostly they are better quality, low volume versions of the commodities available on supermarket shelves.Sometimes they work, and consumers pay a significant premium for  the story that supports the claims, but generally the promise given by the adjectives is taken on trust by consumers.

Technology will increasingly have a role in this as magic like Blockchain emerges that can both guarantee the integrity of products supply chain, and make it absolutely transparent. Suddenly the hyperbole can be subjected to rational scrutiny.

In 2013 George Clooney and a few of his mates wanted their own brand of tequila. Why not, they can afford whatever they want, (but why Tequila??) anyway, the brand they chose and subsequently built,  ‘Casamigos’ has just been bought by Diageo for $US1 billion, around 1.3 Billion Aussie. Not bad in four years!

I do not drink tequila, and the term ‘Super Premium Tequila’  seems to me to be an absolute oxymoron, although perhaps I am unduly influenced by one very bad night involving a bottle of the stuff and a lemon tree while at University.

For $1.3 billion I could be persuaded to give tequila a second chance. Is this growth and purchase of such a highly personalised brand another signpost that consumers are demanding a whole set of new experiences from the items they buy, or is it just something in the cactus?