by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
“Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment”, part four of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” provides a path for changing attitudes and behaviour, which is after all the main objective of advertising and marketing communication.
Whether we are discussing leadership in an organisation or thought leadership in an area of professional expertise, great brands are leaders in consumer advocacy in their product or service category.
Here’s the original list compiled by Dale Carnegie:
1. Begin with praise and sincere appreciation.
2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person.
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5. Let the other person save face
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.
One of the most powerful techniques in selling, be it in person or through communicating in any media, is asking questions and either letting the audience arrive at their own conclusion or suggesting one for them! “Tired? Stressed? You’ll Feel Better on Swisse”.
Brands that have admitted their mistakes and promised to learn from them tend to have recover quickly but those that try to defend their actions and shift the blame tend to lose trust and damage their brand reputation.
Things will go wrong in business and mistakes will happen, and today in the world of social media, where there is nowhere to hide, the strength of a brand’s relationship with its customers is about how it deals with failures.
Domino’s pizza did this in 2011. In the ads, Domino’s admitted that its pizzas were terrible, explained that it redesigned them, and asked people to give them a try.
“Viewers of these ads described them as “bold” and “refreshing,” and gave the company credit for acknowledging what everyone already knew. More important, people tried the pizza and found they liked it. The result: store sales rose and quarterly profits doubled. Domino’s took a failure point — its horrible pizzas — and made it a rallying point. The company saw negative comments as a gift from customers, an opportunity to improve the product, rather than a liability.”
Ref: HBR Blog Network: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/the_art_of_admitting_failure.html
by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
The Interest and Desire parts of AIDA model go hand-in-hand: As you’re building the audience interest, you also need to guide them to understand how what you’re offering can help them and the best way of doing this is by appealing to their personal needs and wants.
“Fundamental techniques in handling people”, part one of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” provides a great recipe for generating desire:
1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in other person an eager want.
Here in the immortal words of Dale Carnegie, is the main reason you will rarely see advertisers go into direct “comparative advertising” and tackle their competition head on.
“Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”
Carnegie goes onto quote B. F. Skinner,”… the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment. The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.”
And this is the basis of all loyalty and reward programs that have been implemented for the last 100 or so years primarily by retailers ranging from coupons to points! Simple – reward good behaviour!
Some brands don’t even realise that they inhibit their brand development by criticizing their audience behaviour without even knowing it! Can they still be incredibly successful – sure, after all the brand slogan or it’s positioning statement is not the sole success factor of a business! And I for one believe that the extremely successful Specsavers optical chain could be even more successful with a slogan that does not implicitly berate it’s target audience – “You should have gone to Specsavers”.
Being myopic and hence the ideal prospect for Specsavers, I’m ready to dispense some long-sighted brand building advice!
by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
Interest is one of the most challenging stages of the AIDA model.: You’ve captured the attention of your target audience, but you now need them to understand your message beyond the initial headline or sound bite.
Gaining the audience interest is more challenging than grabbing their attention and the message must stay focused on the needs of the audience.
“Six ways to make people like you”, part two of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” provides a great recipe for generating interest, after all it’s much easier to interest someone when they like you, your company or your message:
1. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
2. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
3. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
4. Become genuinely interested in other people.
5. Smile
6. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
by admin | Sep 2, 2012 | Blog
In the last blog “What is a Brand in the Words of a Few Good Men?” we discussed why we need to go back to basics and not hide behind jargon, call a brand for what it is – a person’s or an organization’s reputation.
So how do you build and manage a reputation, in other words a powerful brand that connects with your customers and prospects by being unique and satisfying their physical and emotional needs?
Brand Building is Reputation Building
You say what you do and then do what you say. In other words, building a reputation is about effective communication and keeping your promises to earn trust.
Effective marketing communication is first and foremost about getting ATTENTION! Without it, your message will simply never have a chance. This one of the reasons headlines, regardless of the media they appear on are paramount. If the headline doesn’t grab attention then the rest of the article, story, blog, tweet, video, billboard, etc will not have a chance to communicate the rest of the message.
There are many different techniques advertisers, PR people, journalists, writers, educators and anyone in the communication business use to get attention, but in the very simplest form, “How to Win Friends and Influence people” summarises it perfectly in the section titled “Win people to your way of thinking”:
1. Dramatize your ideas. Most great advertising dramatises ideas, as do great speechwriters and script writers. Great ads for example manage to tell an emotional and engaging story in just 60 seconds.
2. Throw down a challenge. From shampoos to household appliances or overnight deliveries, a promise or a guarantee is way to challenge the status quo and grab attention!
3. Appeal to the nobler motives.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Let the person feel that the idea is his or hers
6. Let the other person do a great deal of talking
7. Get the other person saying ‘yes’ immediately
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of views.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires
10. Avoid Arguments.
11. Show respect, never say “you are wrong”
12. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
by admin | Jan 8, 2011 | Blog, Strategy
An effective brand is the key to finding, attracting and retaining customers and earning profits! Yet most small business owners just don’t know where to start and are doing themselves and their customers a terrible disservice.
Much more has been written about “what is a brand” in the last 20 years then about “how to create it”, especially when it comes to small and medium enterprise.
qubePartners aims to address this need and provide easy to understand and simple to implement guidelines for SME business owners to either ‘do it themselves’ or being well prepared to work together with marketing professionals to achieve the desired business objectives in the shortest possible timeframe with the least amount of investment and personal stress.
Most importantly our aim is to make branding a fun experience! And experience one can learn from easily and provide the ability to apply this to their own circumstances. For example “Branding for Dummies” is a great book but it is over 300 pages long and not the 300 type of pages you can flick through. This blog is designed as a pleasurable read, a coffee table guide if you will, that can be read and absorbed and then referred to when and if required.
Simplicity is hard. It has taken me over 15 years to “simplify” my knowledge gained working on both the client and agency side of the marketing fence into this blog and the templates I will be including in it. You will benefit not only from my personal experience and knowledge gained by working with Australia’s biggest brands as well as over 100 SMEs in the last 5 years, but constant professional development, following the latest findings in professional industry journals and books written on the subject of marketing and branding.
Until my next post, here is my top 10 list of books that I would encourage you to read to both improve your marketing skills as well as provide you with a source of endless ideas and inspiration:
- “The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook” by Seth Godin and Jay Conrad Levinson.
- “Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars” by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, Jill Lublin.
- “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!” by Al Ries, Jack Trout
- “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al Ries and Laura Ries
- “Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position” by Brad VanAuken
- “22 Irrefutable Laws of Advertising: And When to Violate Them” by Michael Newman
- “Sell the Brand First: How to Sell Your Brand and Create Lasting Customer Loyalty” by Dan Stiff
- “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini
- “Simplicity” by Edward De Bono
- “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
However you can relax in the knowledge that everything you need to develop a powerful brand for your business will be provided.
qubePartners blog will show you how to harness the power of branding to grow your small business. We will be examining the techniques big (famous) businesses use to develop their brands and show you how to apply them to your small business. You will discover how to:
- Create (or recreate) your brand for growing your business through the scientifically proven principles of influence and persuasion
- How to position your brand to best satisfy your customers and fight your competitors
- How to align your brand with your core personal (business) values
- How to develop brand communications (marketing collateral) that will assist you in positively influencing your target audience
- How to avoid the pitfalls that plague your competitors and sometimes undo the years of successes of those “big brands.”
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