Cliff's Edge Blog
Thoughts on Marketing
How to Market a Heart Attack
0759 days
In terms of marketing, explaining the latest rage of ultra-high calorie menu items at fast-food restaurants these days would seem like shooting fried chicken in a bucket. I’ve often said that marketing to the seven deadly sins is a sure way to succeed. And gluttony is big on that list.
However, the recent explosion of high calorie offerings commit marketing gluttony by appealing to all seven of those sins! No wonder it is a huge success. But lets see how it does all that, forgetting the 1200 calorie IHOP five layer, cheesecake pancake stacker breakfast, and focusing on the KFC Double Down.
Gluttony – Do we really have to point out the excess of food here?
Pride – You can eat this sandwich and still look like each of the model/actors in the commercial do.
- Envy – Like beer commercials, we want the lifestyle of these kind of guys. We envy them and want to dress like they dress, have faces like they have, and bodies like they do. What better way than to eat what they eat?
The IHOP 5-Layer Cheesecake Pancake Stacker
- Lust – We want to eat this chicken concoction, and envy the guys who are about to. We love what they love, and want to look like they look in spite of it.
- Anger – At a time when government is demanding we reduce salt, telling us our kids are fat, and making laws that say toys can be given only with healthy foods, people are rebelling by these indulgences. Their timing is happening exactly when harsher rules for healthier food are becoming more common. Forget the rules, we want what we want.
Greed – Although no price is listed, it fills you up the way that two normal sandwiches would. So this sandwich ends up being cheap. You can commit gluttony on a shoestring.
Sloth – No one would expect to put in a full workout after one of these. Take a look at the actors in the ad. They are all in great shape, but dressed to relax. The workout will wait for them, and it can wait for you too.
So the Seven Deadly sins strike again. This time in a big way.
Social Media…Tried and True Marketing Repackaged
0774 days
South Beach's string of art deco hotels had it before social media did.
The difference between traditional advertising and social media are about as profound as I have experienced as new media during my career. If only because of the way it asks marketers to think.
In my career, I’ve experienced the revolution of computers dominating all aspects of advertising, from analysis, to creative services, print production, you name it.
I have also witnessed as variable digital marketing has pushed its way past buyers used to a certain cost per piece, creative directors now responsible for what data is available, and response rates that jump from 2% to 12%, only to find that the new standard was higher.
Like all those other revolutions, social media really doesn’t introduce anything new. It just forces you to think differently about things we already know.
First, Social media is a conversation where the audience dominates, not like outbound advertising where you can spend enough money to be heard by whoever you want to be heard by.
The same thing has happened forever in many industries. Have you seen areas dominated by furniture stores, car dealers, restaurants or nightclubs? You’ll notice that like businesses often seem to congregate in the same area.
So when you shop for a bedroom set, you walk from one store to the next. Window shop here, walk through the showroom there. You’ll choose where you will buy. You’ll find the sales person you like, the offerings you appreciate, and the best deals on the block. But it is all on your terms, and they all know their competition is right next door, so they treat you as if they really want your business.
The same is true with social media. They’ll stop by as long as you are more useful to them than the guy next door. In this case, next door can be a continent away, and what they are looking for is not an immediate purchase, it is information. You have to provide that to be considered credible and in their circle. It buys you a storefront on the right street, where you can now entice passers by to stop in and talk. Just know that as soon as they are no longer engaged, they’ll move on.
It doesn’t mean you failed or that the sale is lost. They are entirely likely to come back when what you offer is what they now want. At least now they know you. That is more important in the long run than having the lowest price and making the short-term sale.
Social media is nothing new in marketing. You just have to recognize where you have seen it before.
The Healthcare Brand
0791 days
The Marketing of Healthcare just needed one good icon...maybe.
I keep hearing that the problem with the new healthcare bill, is that the President didn’t get his message out well enough. Sounds like a marketing problem then. So I thought I would take a look at it from a brand point of view.
The most important aspect of any brand is the brand promise. Define in a sentence, what makes your brand different and better than the competition for your particular audience.
The promise is easy to understand, as it was repeated often enough throughout the last year. The program will cover 30 million more people, and it would lower the deficit. That simple statement summarized the bill, or brand value.
So lets analyze the brand promise in terms of marketing. The promise will determine the success of any brand. Surely this one did not suffer from an inability to be heard. Does the statement satisfy the five characteristics required to get the brand off on the right footing.
- Superlative – Certainly, the brand created a new category of healthcare insurance product. It is indeed the leader in the category of non-traditional ways to provide healthcare insurance.
- Important – Although lowering the deficit is important to government, lowering costs to consumers is what is important to citizens. It was high costs and uninsured Americans that prompted the issue in the first place. Certainly, if we are taxed enough, it will lower the deficit. However, the problem was that healthcare costs for citizens had become too high. In terms of healthcare, the deficit is not an issue, costs are.
Further, providing coverage to 30 million more people is of importance only to those 30 million. Surely, we all want more people covered. But in marketing, making someone besides your audience better off will never sell your product. You have to make your audience better off. - Believable – Experience has taught us all that a government program will always be more expensive than we are told. No case had been made to make the audience believe that this situation was any different. If people can’t believe the brand promise, they won’t accept the brand. If McDonalds came out with French fries that claimed to have zero calories and tastes better than the original, would you believe it?
- Memorable – That brand promise is memorable. It gets extra credit because it has been so often repeated. Repetition is valuable to a brand promise.
- Tangible – We must experience the promised result when we interact with the brand. That is yet to be seen, since the brand has just been launched.
As a result, it meets only two of the five criteria, with one incomplete. Remember, your brand must meet all five to be successful, unless you too have a way to legislate people to buy from you.
The Lessons of a Mad Man
0795 days
Ah for the days when advertising was advertising....or was it?
Ah, the days of real marketing. Back when one smoked a pipe right at the conference table, when the after dinner martini hour started just after breakfast, when…OK, maybe those weren’t all they are cracked up to be.
However, they did understand the business. The rest of us would do well to understand how they went about it. It seems that for every example of great marketing (not to be confused with great creative) we see today, there are tons of awful and awfully expensive avoidable mistakes to counter them. I am sure that the disasters occurred back then too, but like music, since only the classics live on, from our perspective it seems like the older era featured nothing but great work.
These trying times are weeding poor efforts out of today’s marketing, however. Except for a couple of temporary lapses, our economy has been good for a very long time. For marketers, that meant that we could put out some poorly thought out work, and still have a campaign succeed.
This economy is not as forgiving. If you haven’t been clear in defining your particular value, and been able to clearly communicate it to exactly the right audience, you have little chance to succeed.
As a result, having the tools available to create and deliver advertising are not enough. Now we have to understand when PR is necessary instead of advertising, how to articulate and even establish the brand, how to collect and effectively use response data available through online campaigns, and what to adjust when things still don’t work as well as they should.
It is a scary time for marketers who are accustomed selecting work based on nothing more than their personal color preferences, and still having success. But there is no need to be afraid. Solid marketing still works every time…even now.
Advertise to the Seven Deadly Sins
0801 days
by Cliff Zugay
in Advertising
The Seven Deadly Sins
The new year has arrived, and we celebrated the most hedonistic of holidays. Celebrate to excess on New Year’s Eve, while counting down the inevitable.Then, lounge about on New Years Day, watching parades and bowl games. The only honoree is Father Time, who appropriately changes into an infantat midnight. What symbol is more self absorbed? The only gifts given are those that are to be consumed that day.
The very idea reminds me of the most fundamental rule of advertising. To promote a product, appeal to one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth may carve your path to Hades, but suggesting that your brand will feed any of these will help make that brand successful.
How many times have you been attracted to a product that made one of these promises?
- A beer that makes you popular with women (beer teaches marketing, I always say).
- A car that makes others stop and look at you drive down the street.
- A restaurant where you feast like a king.
- A cake mix that lets you get back at the perennial baking queen by just opening a box.
- Financial services that make you wealthier.
- A home appliance that does the work for you.It works.
Plain and simple. So when you are about to find a marketing angle for your next project, be sure to ask how that product will make the user envied, sexy, rich, pretty, fat or lazy.
Nobody Cares About You
1802 days
by Cliff Zugay
in Marketing
Your best customers want what you have to offer.
That may be the most important statement any marketer can learn. Sure, it took your whole career to develop that method, product, or perfect service that you provide. Behind what people buy from you is years of work, a huge infrastructure to assure quality and consistency, and countless hours away from your family (not including those spent with your family when you were thinking up ways to make it all work even better).
But nobody cares.
No one buys your product to repay your effort. They buy it because of what they get out of it. If it fell out of a tree, or if you toiled countless hours to provide it doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether they think it will make them richer, prettier, more popular, envied, or lazier.
You would be wise to market accordingly. Don’t bother to tell anyone about the brilliant programmer who helped develop that new GPS iPhone application you sell, all they want to know is that it will easily find their kid’s opponent’s home soccer field.
Don’t boast of the harder enamel used in the boat polish, just let them know they only have to do it once a year, and all their friends will think they hired a service.
If you are pushing your product, quit your marketing job and go into sales. Marketing has to draw people toward your product. You can’t push with marketing.
Drink Beer to Learn Marketing
1802 days
Here is to an education in marketing.
Everything you need to know about marketing can be learned from beer. I’ll do a late night article some day on what else you can learn from it, but for now lets settle for marketing. Look at beer ads. What has worked, what has not? What has been cancelled, what campaigns do you still see running?
One thing you can see is that the old adage of sex sells is a little simplistic. Lifestyle sells. After all, how sexy is the big, burly Miller Lite beer truck driver? That campaign has brought quick success to a brand that had been dead for years. Oddly enough, it came from the same ad agency that gave us the ill-fated Man Rules.” A cute enough concept, but one that had nothing to do with the beer, and therefore didn’t help sell any. So it got canned…no pun intended.
You’ll notice that Heineken changed their ads recently. They used to boast about it being from Holland. But no one cares about that. Then they started running “All About the Beer” where cool people picked each other up in swanky bars with Heineken instead of martinis. Now people drink it. It showes a desireable lifestyle, which is a benefit to the drinker. It’s Dutch origination was meaningless to the people the brand courted.
By far the best has to come from Corona. Associating your beer with a desirable lifestyle is a technique that the beer companies are constantly having to re-learn. But Corona not only identified itself with the relaxed, Caribbean vacation, it dominates it. It owns the whole lifestyle, not a just particular type of party.
If you think you are weary of those Corona ads, don’t be. You should appreciate the genius instead. Repeating that message in various ways only helps to reinforce that brand. I am sure they are running short of ways to portray it, but the point is selling beer, not entertaining. So I hope they never stop. It is good to see all the ways that campaign succeeds.
Makes me kind of thirsty for a beach and a palm tree.
