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 | Aug 27, 2012 | Blog
NO!
Of course a marketing consultant is not going to admit that the profession is dying as proposed by the now famous article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog, titled “Marketing Is Dead.”
This particular marketing consultant is certainly jealous of the controversial title of the article and the publicity it has received but has to disagree vehemently with the proposition that marketing is dead, not just to defend all marketing consultants and our profession, but because the claim is simply not true, especially when you examine the small business segment, which is yet to get a handle on the basic principles of marketing in general, let alone the more complex issues.
Firstly, lets recap the main points made by the article and then look at the so called evidence, to see whether I personally and my fellow marketing consultants in fact died on the fateful day of August 9th when this outlandish claim pronounced us dead.
Proposition 1:
Studies have confirmed that buyers are no longer paying much attention and traditional marketing communications (Traditional marketing as defined buy the author — includes advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications)
Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.
Rebuttal 1:
You don’t say! Wow, we marketing consultants have had our head in the sand all this time!?
For SME’s, based on the 2011 Hubspot Study, Inbound Marketing (prospects find you; Social Media, SEO, PPC and Blogs) has a 62% lower Cost Per Lead than Outbound Marketing (Direct Mail, Trade Shows, Telemarketing).
The situation is similar at the top end of town, with more and more companies investing less and less into traditional media and more and more into online and social media marketing, where dialogue can be had with their customers and prospects.
And whether the author, Bill Lee, likes it or not, all of these in-bound efforts still need skills of advertising, PR, and marketing communication professionals, albeit skills that now need to be upgraded through ongoing professional development, but again this is nothing new, it’s called change!
Additionally, Mr.Lee needs to be reminded that ‘branding’ is not a ‘traditional marketing communication’, but the result of them. Here are 2 articles on ‘what is branding’ – the most misused and misunderstood term in business today!
http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/and-then-there-was-brand
http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/what-is-a-brand-in-the-words-of-a-few-good-men
Proposition 2:
Studies show that CEOs have lost all patience with marketers and say they lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and are sick of all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.
Rebuttal 2:
Marketers are losing out to the bean counters in the boardroom, however assuming brand equity can not be linked to organisational success, which it actually can be:
http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap and
http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/Best-Global-Brands-2011.aspx
the CEO’s and their distinguished consultants do not have anything to replace the old world marketers with!
Additionally, and especially after the spate of recent global meltdowns, everyone is questioning the value of these overpaid CEO’s. So who cares what they think? Let them like sheep cut their marketing budgets which they regularly do during every economic downturn and they can then watch their competitors who keep investing into marketing pass them by:
1. A number of studies conducted since WWII showed something that marketers have known all along – keep marketing through the downturn. The following quote is from Professional Marketing, Oct-Dec 2008 – article titled “All Hands On Deck”: “…companies that increased marketing spend (relative to market size) during a recession, increased their return on capital employed by 5% in the recovery, compared to a 1% decline for the budget cutters”
2. Recent UK research, “Values of Design FactFinder by the Design Council” has shown that:
- Rapidly growing businesses are nearly six times as likely as static ones to see design as integral.
- Shares in design-led businesses have outperformed the FTSE 100 by more than 200% over the past decade.
- For every £100 a design alert business spends on design, turnover increases by £225.
- Businesses that add value through design see a greater impact on business performance than the rest.
And design is an integral part of the brand communication process, the very process that Bill Lee proclaims as a dead discipline.
Proposition 3:
In today’s increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t make sense, because organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don’t come from the buyer’s world and whose interests aren’t necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something.
Rebuttal 3:
This one is the simplest proposition to shoot down. Obviously the problem is not hiring the right marketing people! Part of being a good marketer is the ability to get into people’s minds and hearts. Regardless of whether the marketing consultant is a user of the product or service they are promoting, the value of a marketing consultant is to be able to see challenges from the customer perspective and bring new solutions to the problem. If Apple asked their customers to design an MP3 player and a new phone they may have ended up with better products rather than the revolutions that were the iPod and iPhone. Great marketers have been able to give something of value to customers that customers didn’t even know they wanted.
The author then proposes solutions that every marketing consultant would certainly agree with as they have always been the backbone of successful marketing such as building passionate communities or tribes around your brand, targeting customer influencers, looking after VIP’s and assisting them to become advocates.
Marketing is evolving!
In conclusion, let’s put things in perspective – Marketing is not dead or dying, it like most other professions has some problems in the board room, but at least we don’t have a problem of image in the bedroom, as marketing is still seen as a sexy profession, albeit probably for all the wrong reasons.
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