Branding

See that guy down there?

He’s everywhere. I think he might be following me.

Really. I’ve done quite a bit of sales and business development work in the past few years and that involves brief visits to a lot of websites. That guy is everywhere. He is the core of all business decision-making throughout the world.

Obviously the guy is actually a cheap or low-cost photo in someone’s royalty-free gallery. He shows up on so many websites because he’s a cheap date.

What does that say about your company?

I am a mirror upon which you may reflect your life dreams! Now go click the "Contact Us" link and buy something.

A brand is a critical element to separate your firm from all your competitors. What do you do better? What skills, services and experience do you bring to a project that no one else can boast?

How does a cheap website filled with smiling, robot-like people say something positive about you or your firm?

I get it. Smaller firms and start-ups tend to be cash poor. There’s no budget for original photography or true design on the website.

I’ll grant you that there’s no budget, but that doesn’t mean there are no resources. If you’re an entrepreneur bootstrapping your way to success, get creative. Take a few pictures yourself – it may help your creativity to get out of that basement office once in a while.

Find a cousin or neighbor looking to break into a photography career and barter. You’ll offer a professional credit for published work, they’ll create interesting photos and visuals. No cash lost, and you both get what you want.

This is your business. This is your baby. Don’t skimp on the most publicly visible part of your firm.

Per a previous post, my son recently moved up to the world of Boy Scouts.

This was great news for me. Cub Scouts has its good points, but I was itching to move up to camping, fire and knives.

As we stepped up to this new world, my son and I went off to Bass Pro Shops to prepare for an upcoming campout – specifically, it was going to be cold and we needed real sleeping bags.

If any of you have not gone to a Bass Pro Shop yet let me tell you, the word “awesome” isn’t nearly strong enough to describe the experience. The store is huge, and it’s designed to resemble the outdoors.

The one we went to in Bolingbrook had a huge fish tank – designed to look like it’s part of a real, natural scene – filled with the kind of fish I’ve only dreamed of catching. There are stuffed deer, birds and elk all over the store.

It was like drenching myself in testosterone.  Boo-yah!

Excuse me. I'd like to discuss your email preferences.

I’d love to get more into this outdoor lifestyle. Alas, at the moment the budget for such things is somewhat limited. However, I signed up on their website just so I could dream.

Turns out, however, that Bass Pro Shop’s email marketing program is … aggressive. I was receiving multiple emails per week with one offer or another. After a few weeks of it I decided that I had enough and it was time to unsubscribe.

It’s not that I didn’t want to buy eventually, or that I didn’t like Bass Pro Shops. They were just being too aggressive. Too many emails.

Most organizations would have lost me from their list, but it turns out that Bass Pro Shops at this point did it right.

I could fully unsubscribe, but they gave me better options. In particular, I had an option to limit emails to one per month. That’s all I wanted.

Most organizations I’ve seen set their unsubscribe as an all or nothing proposition. In many cases, that’s simply because the organization doesn’t have the capacity to fine-tune the frequency. For example, a small to mid-size business can’t realistically expect to put an individual on and off a newsletter list to hit some frequency target.

The big boys can do it, however. Bass Pro Shops kept a potential customer by respecting my wishes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just write an email knowing that the reader would simply interpret the direct message and respond accordingly?

All this reading between the lines and subtext is a pain.

Too bad.

Communications is about far more than just sending a message. Matter of fact, the overt message is almost the least important element of communication. While you’re struggling to be as clear as possible with your message, your prospect is evaluating your body language and picking out sub-text from your word choices.

Lose focus on your whole message and it can kill a deal.

My son is finally at the age where we’re ready to graduate from Cub Scouts (crafts, hand puppets and games) and move up to Boy Scouts (camping, fire and knives!). As we happen to live in a bizarre area with multiple overlapping Boy Scout Troops we actually have to put some time into touring and selecting the best-fit Troop.

I'm not sure your knot tying is up to our standards.

In most cases, it means scheduling a time to visit the Troop during one of their meetings to give your son a chance to interact with current members and get a sense for how the Troop operates.

In almost all cases, this has been a positive, if slightly bumpy process. Boy Scout Troops are run by volunteer parents. They have the best of intentions but may not respond to an email on a business timeframe. No big deal.

One Troop, however,  knocked itself out of contention because of the attitude conveyed in the response.

This is one of the bigger Troops in the area. I sent an email asking about setting up a Troop visit in the next few weeks and awaited a reply.

From a technical perspective, the reply was everything it should be. It shared the dates for upcoming meetings, talked a little about the Troop and let me know what I needed to do to schedule a visit. So far, so good.

However, through word choice and presentation, the primary message that came through on the email was pure arrogance.

It was a form letter email with no greeting. It didn’t even open with a “Thank you for considering our Troop, we’re excited to meet you!”

If I could paraphrase, this is what the message really said:

Dear Prospective Scout,

We’re a very large Boy Scout Troop and lots of people want to join. You can join if you want. The following procedures will let you do that with the least inconvenience to me.

Thanks,
Membership Chair

Now because I’m a classy communications professional I didn’t actually respond to the email, but here’s what was in my head:

Screw you.

It’s a large Troop. Recruiting and on-boarding prospective members is a daunting task. I get it. I’ve been there. But their “invitation” email told me all I needed to know. Being big is important to that Troop’s identity, and having my son join was only interesting if it was in pursuit of that goal and it wasn’t inconvenient.

I wish them the best. We’ll be looking elsewhere.

B2C marketers do some amazing work – particularly in efforts over the past decade to establish one-on-one connections with consumers by leveraging database technology in marketing campaigns.

Some of those ideas are appropriate for a B2B space. However, we need to remember that the “one-on-one” communications over on the B2C side are a simulation of close, personal interaction, not the real thing.

Often, B2B marketing involves communication to a much, much smaller, more targeted audience than consumer marketing. The term “smaller” can still include hundreds of thousands of prospects, so even on the B2B side its often not possible to have a genuine individual connection. Attempts to simulate that via B2C-style personalization techniques can fall flat in such an environment.

B2C tactics are about reaching large audiences efficiently. That’s the temptation when planning out a B2B marketing approach. Adopt some B2C personalization tactics and in no time you’ll be neck deep in happy new clients.

If your marketing plan calls for one of these, you're in trouble.

The kind of high volume marketing that works in the B2C world often only does because the intended customers are content with a simulation of one-on-one interaction. It’s nice if Coca-Cola sends an email with my first name in the greeting, but I don’t really care.

That’s not true when we’re talking about a service provider that offers to fill a critical function in my company. That person need to actually know and understand me and my business. That’s about much more than inserting my name at the top of an email blast.

I’ve seen this dilemma quite a bit when it comes to producing articles, newsletters and other content. People can tell when a newsletter is build from semi-personalized generic content. Such things are ignored.

Take the time to produce something original and unique for your audience.

Stop insisting that everything works.

The video below shares the insights of Tim Harford at The Undercover Economist. He’s spent several years studying failure  and apparently has a book coming out on the subject in the near future.

Failure is the key to success – or, more to the point, understanding failure is the key to success.

Organizations cannot accomplish new things without a willingness to court failure. Not all new ideas will work. From my experience, most ideas will rumble along with just enough success to justify keeping it going, but not enough to be truly considered  a success. The ideas that are a flop are almost a relief, because at least then you can pull the plug with no regrets.

Professional associations are often stuck in a rut because they don’t have an appetite for failure. That’s one reason why they tend to approach social media with such fear. It could be a fantastic tool to build a relationship with members and prospects, but no one has really figured out how to make that work yet.

Instead, associations either ignore it (because without the support of professional associations social media will collapse, right?) or they take such tentative steps that nothing concrete is accomplished.

Take the risk.

If you don't know what you did, I'm certainly not going to tell you.

There are a lot of things in life that I freely admit I don’t get. Fashion is one of those.

I don’t mean that I have a genetic inability to know what colors match and struggle with the tuck/untuck dilemma when dressing in the morning. Well … actually, that is a pretty accurate description of me.

Moving on, I don’t understand the whole high-fashion, runway model thing. The picture over there to the right was a teaser on the Wall Street Journal home page to get me to read an article on some amazing fashion trend.

Look at that model. Doesn’t the expression on her face just scream “Joie de vivre”? That means “Joy of Life” to those who lack my sophisticated understanding of foreign languages.

Why would someone looking to sell clothes have a model walk down a runway glaring at me?

Assuming the fashion writer isn’t just making it up as he goes along, presumably the point of this fashion collection was to somehow celebrate the joy of life.

The photo essay included nine photos. Each model looked angrier than the last.

I have no ultimate marketing wisdom here. I just don’t get it.

Like a good little marketing consultant I signed up for Groupon a few months back just to get a sense for how it all works. Overall, it was a clever system, handled well. However, my only goal was to see what it was and I didn’t have much interest in buying anything.

So … unsubscribe time.

Fie on you my ancient nemesis!

Mechanically, Groupon handled the unsubscribe in textbook best practice fashion. The email had an easy to find link, one click and I’m out.

But then they got clever, and as a result I was almost tempted to rejoin the list just because they gave me a laugh to start my day.

Take a look at the picture to the right. That’s a shot from Groupon’s unsubscribe screen. I meet Derrick, the guy who thought I’d like the offer that prompted me to unsubscribe.

With the click of a button, I can punish Derrick. Can I resist? Of course not! click …

Someone comes out on a video clip, yells at Derrick and pretends to throw coffee on him. Groupon then tells me that was pretty mean and invites me to re-subscribe if I feel bad now.

That was, without a doubt, the best unsubscribe experience I’ve ever had!

Groupon awesomeness, in logo form

It kept true to the brand – both in terms of the sense of fun and in keeping in line with email marketing best practices.

I didn’t re-subscribe, but I do feel guilty about it.

Sorry Derrick.

I just noticed the other day that the operating system has become the lead message in mobile phone advertising. I’m not sure exactly when that transition happened, but I suspect it was about the time that the iPhone came out.

You punk kids! Where's the love?

It used to be that the actual phone handset was something from Motorola, Samsung, etc. – or a least a brand that those companies owned. These days, I see ads focusing on the operating system – Windows, Android, etc.

It’s almost as if the designer and manufacturer of the physical handset is irrelevant. Look at all those Android phones out there. Someone makes them. Is it Motorola? Samsung? Some new player? I have no idea.

That’s a pretty clear indication of the decline of the Motorola brand. At one point, Motorola was closely associated with mobile phone service. It meant quality, innovation, technology. Today, they hardly seem to exist in the marcom space.

Verizon, AT&T and everyone else are promoting the fact that their phones are on Android. They company that makes the phone is irrelevant.