Marketing Matters

Why hire an outside agency or consultant to do your marketing or at least work with your current internal marketing department? A good question, and one for which I regularly find real world examples. Let me start with one of the most important reasons…objectivity.

Brenner Associates recently redesigned a website for a software/services company. They were flabbergasted that we recommended NOT mentioning the name of their flagship product anywhere on the home page (with limited room for text). Instead, we suggested substituting the product name with important key phrases that clearly explain the benefits and value of this product.

To someone inside the company, the product name is everything. While under development, the product – and its name – was everything to the employees. They lived, breathed and dreamt about it for months if not years on end. So when it came time to market their new widget, it seemed obvious that the company’s website homepage should scream the product name upfront and center.

Too bad the rest of the world did not have the same pre-launch experience. Potential customers never head the product name before and don’t care, at this point, what it’s called. However, what they DO know is that they have a problem that needs solving. And they have a general idea of what terms to use to look for solutions.

For example, say your company has just launched a new product called MoraleCentral, a new online tool that gives users tips on how to solve employee morale issues. 

Chances are, potential customers – those with employee morale problems – would go to the Internet and Google such terms as  “employee moral”, “moral boosting”, “improving employee productivity” or “teamwork tips” But unless they are already familiar with the product itself, chances are zip that they would search for “MoraleCentral”.

More importantly, once they found your website, its important that they instantly know that they’ve came to the right place. If you don’t catch their interest in the first second or two, they are just a click away to the next site.

So, what would be of more value to have highlighted on your homepage? The term MoralCentral or the words “Solve Employee Morale Problems Now”? The product title means diddly to them. But when they see the “solve employee moral” highlighted, they know instantly that they’ve come to the right place.

For the guy who has been working on MoralCentral for the past year and a half, this might seem counter intuitive. For an outside marketing pro, the choice is obvious.

It addition, MoralCentral will certainly have no SEO value whatsoever. The phrase used to highlighting the problem/solution, however, will have been chosen based upon its proven track record for driving viewers to websites. What’s the point of highlighting anything if no one will ever see it?

Another case in point

Several years ago, Brenner Associates was working with a top printer manufacturer. The internal marketing team was quite excited (and anxious) because the company was about to launch a new printer, the XPT 3000 (not the real name). The reason this was such a big deal to the printer company and its employees is because the new XPT3000 was about to replace the company’s best selling printer to date. If this new printer wasn’t a success, it could really hurt sales.

So Brenner Associates looked at the new product and at the competitive landscape and at customer demand and decided that the best thing about this new printer was that fact that it was, by far, the fastest printer under $100. And that is what we led with our press release headline – AJAX Introduces The Fastest Printer Under $100.

The internal marketing manager was upset. Why didn’t we mention the name of the printer or that it was replacing their most popular printer?

He wanted a headline that read AJAX Replaces Popular XPT1000 With New XPT3000.

To you and me (outsiders) it should be obvious. But it wasn’t so clear to the person that had been living and breathing XPT3000 for the past six months.

Then I asked the manager, “what if Frigidaire was about to replace its best selling refrigerator with one that was twice as big for half the price. Should the headline be Frigidaire Replaces Its Best Selling Refrigerator With New One or Frigidaire’s New Refrigerator Gives You More For Less ?

This was easy for him to answer correctly.

He was an outsider looking in.

Objectivity.

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The "Big Carl" breaking the rules

I LIKE BREAKING the rules. If done right, it can get you valuable attention, make you stand out and even give you a huge competitive edge. It can, of course, also get you into trouble.

With that in mind, I’ve always been drawn to that age-old edict “You must know the rules before you can break them.” I first heard this pearl of wisdom as it relates to music theory. The rule says you must play “X” but you can break the rule and play “Y” instead… if you understand how and why it works.

Famous broken rules (and I will tie this to marketing, I promise):

• That long intro scene in the 1953 Brando movie, The Wild One.” The rule said that a movie director shouldn’t hold a camera in one static position for more than 6 seconds. But in the now famous opening scene, Laslo Benedek focuses the camera on a long stretch of open road for more than a minute. Great tension building. xxxxxxxxxxxxxBuildxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx      
• Beat It. The rule said that pop/soul music and heavy metal don’t mix. But when Michael Jackson teamed up with Eddie Van Halen on Beat It, the results were incredible.  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• The rule was that a second is a second is a second. Albert Einstein declared that a second to someone traveling in a rocket at the speed of light could be a lifetime to someone stationary on the ground. His theory of special relativity changed everything.

Public relations and advertising is steeped in rules. The shelves at Barnes and Nobel are lined with such books as “The Fifty Golden Rules For Guerrilla Marketing,” “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” and now, The New Rules of Marketing & PR.” And to be sure, these best sellers are chocked full of great information.

But let’s not forget about the value of breaking the rules as well. I cut my teeth working for a couple of the largest PR agencies in the world and learned the rules from some of the most successful pros in the business. Unfortunately, however, I’ve found that many of these old pros are teaching and abiding by the same rules that governed their strategies twenty years ago. But if you understand the rules, you will know when and how to break them.

In the 1960’s Avis broke the rule that you never position yourself as anything but the marketing leader. The company’s “We’re #2 – We Try Harder” campaign was responsible for tripling their market share from 11% to 33%.

Google breaking the rules

More recently Google broke the branding rule that says company logos are sacred and something to be left alone. By continuing to create new versions of their logo, Google has helped create a fun, friendly persona for a company that others (say…Microsoft or Yahoo perhaps?) would kill for.

Carl’s Jr. just launched a new advertising campaign that breaks the rule governing the use of competitive product comparisons. They make no bones about their “Big Carl” burger is a direct rip off of the Big Mac…and it works.

So it’s disconcerting when experts tell me that I shouldn’t break the rules and that a news release is simply a tool for reporters – sorry, but those are old rules (see previous post), or that marketing video production must be slick and expensive (welcome to the age of YouTube fellas) or that you must keep customer-oriented promotional material out of press documents.

Earlier this year, Brenner Associates created a viral video for a client looking to reach 20-30 year old men. They had previously paid another marketing firm over $20K to create a product video for use on their web site and across the Internet but gut zip in return.

A quick look at the results told me why. Their $20K was well spent on sharp graphics, high quality camera shots and beautiful spokespersons – and they wound up with an advertisement that might have worked twenty years ago but was of no interest to their target audience today.

I promised them I could deliver a more effective video for less than $900. We came up with a creative video that was fun to watch AND reinforced their brand image. We used a hand held camcorder and real people and unscripted dialogue. Posted on their website and on select social network sites, the video has been seen by more than 390,000 potential customers and has been responsible for increasing the company’s web sales by close to 20 percent.

There is another old edict, “Rules were meant to be broken.” And when it comes to public relations and marketing – especially in today’s evolving digital age – strategic rule breaking can be the key to unimaginable success.

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Reports of PR's death, greatly exaggerated

“REPORTS OF MY death have been greatly exaggerated” – a quote attributed to Mark Twain but apropos for today’s PR industry.

I’ve seen several pieces of late, written by journalists and bloggers who appear rushed to sound the death knell over public relations. “New media and Web 2.0 changed the game,” they say, “and make public relations obsolete.”

Fact is – public relations expertise is more relevant, more important today than ever before. Search engine marketing, social network marketing, Web 2.0 applications and the like have all served to increase – not decrease – the value and demand for high-quality public relations.

Doomsayers don’t get it. They think PR is all about writing a press release or getting a story in a magazine. Now that print media is in decline, they say PR is on it’s way out as well. They never understood that press releases and published articles are just means to an end. The core of PR has always been about communication skills and strategies – the ability to evaluate the competitive landscape, identify the right messages and succinctly and effectively communicate those messages to the right audience -wherever they may be.

The doomsayer would like you to think, for instance, that search engine optimization is all about trickery. Add a meta tag descriptor here, pepper a page with keywords there and Voila!, customers will come flocking to your site to buy your stuff.

As attractive as this might sound, it is of course, hogwash. Any substantive expert on SEO will mention meta tags but will hammer home the biggest point over and over again – effective SEO is really all about content – and content is public relations: who is your audience, what do you want to say and what is the best way to say it for the medium you are using. If you focus on these elements and then augment them with a bit of coding strategy, you will have truly effective SEO results.

The same is true when working within social network sites and blogs. A simple technician can set up links to your blog and FaceBook page, but it takes a highly skilled communicator to effectively manage the customer relationships that these sites create. And that’s what PR is really all about.

Press releases haven’t gone away. They are now more important than ever before (see my earlier blog on this subject). Magazines haven’t gone away either. They’ve just expanded online. Journalists haven’t disappeared. They’re also online, along with a host of bloggers, freelancers and forum writers that are also writing about you and your company.

This means that PR isn’t going away either. It has just become more complex and more important to a strategic communications plan than ever before.

To be sure, the role of PR has evolved and practitioners have had to add new skill sets and adapt traditional expertise to an entirely new set of strategies. But their expertise has become critical.

An SEO technician can write all the backend code he/she wants but it will take expert writing skills to create copy that will not only get you listed high in a Google search but will also convert visitors into customers. An HTML expert might promise you more GoogleAd visibility, but it will take PR expertise to ensure the right people are clicking on your ad, reading your information, judging you to be an industry expert and becoming loyal customers.  

This is hardcore PR, pure and simple. There will always be those who promise a cheap and easy route to success. They were the ones who thought a marketing plan consisted of sending poorly written, ineffectual press releases out over BusinessWire and hoping for the best. Today, they are the ones promising success through cheap technical trickery. 

The fact is, marketing today is more complicated and more multi-faceted than ever before. Creating, managing and maximizing the success of a marketing program in the digital age requires a real pro – and today, more than ever, that pro is a public relations expert.

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