Rethink Marketing

Immediately after watching Rebecca Soni's gold medal win on NBC that set the new world record in women's 200M breaststroke at 2:19.56, I saw an AT&T advertisement. A girl with wet hair walks out of her bedroom watching the same gold medal win on her mobile phone. She hears the new world record, pauses for a moment, and then writes on a whiteboard near the front door, "GOAL: 2:19.56."

AT&T's advertising agency must have figured out how to put this ad together between the NBC taping in the afternoon and the final in the evening, but from the viewer's perspective it seemed instantaneous. The tagline, "rethink possible," was a double entendre, talking about rethinking the goal and about rethinking what's possible in instantaneous media.

The genius of the ad was the fact that I am talking about it at all. In fact, I told my wife, my son and several people at work about it. Can you say that about any other advertisement you saw during the Olympics?

The first rule of advertising is to make sure people remember you. Without recall, the ad was a waste of money. Thinking creatively about how to get attention in this media-saturated era will grow in importance over time. Today, at least, AT&T seems to have figured it out.

The One Thing

What's the one thing that makes it as clear as day why your product or service blows away the competition? Today I discovered a great video we have at Vocollect that illustrates this idea. It's a side-by-side comparison of RF scanning versus Vocollect Voice(R). I'm planning to use this as a demonstration to an industry analyst who is not really familiar with our solution and what it can do for distribution center productivity, accuracy and labor management. Skip to the two-minute mark to get the meat.

Personally, I think we should feature this video in almost every interaction we have with prospects. It illustrates the beauty and simplicity of voice even against a proven, nearly ubiquitous technology. The video allows someone who has no experience with our technology to see immediately why we slaughter competitive technologies in most head-to-head comparisons.

I would challenge any brand, product or service to come up with a similar comparison. The best brands often do. I remember a series of great Jeep advertisements many years ago that showed a series of scenarios in which the only way to get to the location was in a Jeep (the best of which was the site of an SUV commercial in which the director wanted to get the SUV on top of a mountain, and the company was going to fly it in--following which the director drove back down the mountain in his Jeep).

If your company doesn't have a great side-by-side comparison, part of your marketing stratetgy needs to be finding the change that you can make that might illustrate the difference. We're going through such a strategy exercise right now to help us determine the next great comparison Vocollect will be able to make. Even though we own the market right now, it is never too soon to find the next great "one thing" that will destroy your competition. And we would rather find it ourselves than have our competitors do so.

Startup Marketing

Today, I'm super excited about Opera Theater of Pittsburgh's Summer Fest. We took my kids to The Magic Flute on Sunday afternoon. I wasn't expecting much, as this opera company is the smaller and lesser-known one in Pittsburgh. (Can you believe my awesome adopted city has not one but two opera companies?) I was blown away by the quality of the singing, the excellence of the orchestra, and the overall quality of the production and inventiveness of the staging.

Unfortunately, the house was perhaps one-third empty. This problem got me thinking about startup marketing. How would I have known about the terrific quality of this production except by word of mouth? This is the first summer that Opera Theater of Pittsburgh is performing a summer series, so that might explain the lack of knowledge. Their basic marketing was clearly on target; I found out about the performance by direct mail. I assume the opera company got my information from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's shared database. But what about other targets such as people who live in or near Fox Chapel where the performance took place?

These days, a lot of startups wishing to expand quickly are using social crowdsourcing deal sites such as Groupon and Living Social. If you have a business with expiring inventory, such as a theater with a limited number of seats or an event that can't make you money once the date has passed, these services can be an excellent option as long as they don't degrade the experience of higher-paying customers by making the large crowd an unpleasant experience. Startups have to take care that they are able to meet the demand, however. I had an experience with a lawn service recently that had to refund me the money because they could never make it out to mow. That's worse than no marketing at all.

A better potential approach is to rely on your existing best supporters. For Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, what about a campaign to give season ticket holders free tickets if they sign up a certain number of friends? Or for us, a discount on next weekend's performance of Candide if we bring four other friends? Or even just a simple plea to existing supporters to Facebook, blog or tweet about the summer series based on their loyalty to the brand?

Right now, we're trying to leverage these relationships at Vocollect. As the industry leader in voice-directed distribution center work, we have a lot of extremely happy customers who are willing to serve as references and/or refer us to other potential customers. It's a lot easier than finding and convincing companies who have never heard of us, and it tends to lead to more like-minded companies and therefore better sales close rates on new deals. All that's required is some database work, internal coordination and a commitment from the executive team that "share of wallet" matters.

For early-stage companies, that means getting a few great wins and wowing those customers with your service and abilities. It's not an easy task, but some of the fastest-growing companies that have survived for a long time seem to take this coddling of early customers to heart. That's an attitude even seasoned companies can use.

Free Advertising

I clicked on CNN this evening and saw Wolf Blitzer using a Mac and a custom light (to light him up in TV style) with an open back. In the opening, you can make out Energizer batteries. What great exposure for these two brands for free on a site with millions of daily exposures! I wondered casually whether Energizer had a deal with CNN because it looked like that light could use a battery cover.

We have a lot of debate within Vocollect about how prominent our logo should be on Talkman(R) wearable computers and our speech recognition headsets. My view is that the name and logo are free advertising anytime our partners (or even our competitors on occasion) show a mobile worker wearing the Vocollect Voice(R) solution. Why sacrifice this free exposure? Sometimes we even see our logo on customer equipment in their promotional materials or in news articles covering that customer, resulting in some free recognition even among customers who would otherwise decline to provide us a reference.

This thinking came to mind a few weeks ago when I saw that one of our competitors chose a distinctive color for their equipment recently. Now personally I would not have chosen pink for a user community that is at least two-thirds male, but I solute their valiant efforts to get their brand image out there, visible and recognizable. They just need a new brand image consultant. And maybe some improved speech recognition capabilities. And perhaps a product that integrates more easily with WMS software. Then they might have a viable brand on their hands!

The Research Nobody Hears

I just returned from Gartner's 2012 supply chain conference, one of 63 of these kinds of events they will hold this year alone. It's a three-day slog that extends to five days when I added a Sunday night meeting with the analysts (requiring me to leave Pittsburgh at 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning) and a Thursday return flight to avoid the red-eye. Highlights: I met lots of interesting executives, talked to some potential prospects and danced to the hotel band's excellent renditions of Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas.

As for the meeting content itself... I was less than impressed. I averaged about two insights per hour, which does not nearly meet my goal number. Even the session on results of the "2011 End-User Wants and Needs Survey" underwhelmed me. Come on, Gartner analysts, you have an entire study with enough sample size to do interesting cross-tabs, and all you can produce for me is four data slides? Ultimately, the lack of data, combined with the persistent "talk at me" format of which Vocollect is as guilty as Gartner, got me to thinking about market research.

I have produced many studies with great insights over my ten years in market research and five years in consulting. Sometimes, I couldn't get people together to discuss the results. Other times, I couldn't interest the key decision-makers in implementing the clear recommendations from the research even when those same decision-makers requested the study in the first place. Still other times, someone else presented the results of the research in a way that obscured some significant findings.

In each of these cases, we were almost better off having not done the research at all because market research that does not get communicated or used is essentially just empty spending. The results stay hidden, so the company ends up failing to act based on customer wants and needs as opposed to acting on instinct and experience. Keeping those failures in mind (my own and others'), I humbly offer several suggestions for getting research noticed:

1. Schedule several times to present the research to different audiences. One research presentation is not enough. Finance wants different insight from sales who want different insight from marketing. Cut the data several different ways and show it to each audience with cross-tabs that answer their particular questions.
2. Bring up the research at every opportunity. Schedule meetings. Send out blast e-mails. Write internal white papers. Invite yourself to meetings on the same topic as the research even when you might not be welcome. Talk about the research at staff meetings. Promise custom cuts of the data based on hallway discussions. Be unavoidable until the insights stick.
3. Help to operationalize the findings. Although it will be more difficult to present a case study or working group format, you will see much better implementation. Turn the research into a project in your meeting (e.g., "Let's break into three groups and brainstorm changes we're planning to make based on the findings. In 20 minutes, we'll regroup and discuss which ones we can implement right away and which ones we can change over the long term.")
4. Revisit key questions. Did the research raise additional questions you can answer through informal qualitative work? Go do it yourself, use your staff or salesforce or current customers to do so, or leverage other past research to answer these questions. This strategy has the added benefit of gaining buy-in for future spending if necessary.
5. Pester the senior executives. The division VP missed your briefing? Schedule one with her yourself as a one-on-one. If she's game, I guarantee that 30 minutes will go further to result in operationalizing results than many of the suggestions above.
6. Archive the work in a public place. Make the research easy to refer back to, especially by the people who will be doing the groundwork later. If you can get them to attribute the reasoning by quoting or sourcing your study, it will be even better.

Speaking of which, I think I owe our new SVP and General Manager a call. I don't think he's seen my past year of work yet.

Accomplishment

Allow me to toot my own horn for a minute. I completed the Pittsburgh Marathon last Sunday in 5 hours, 15 minutes and 22 seconds. (The last stretch of time-consuming training runs also partly explains my absence of posts for a bit.) I ran just about the speed I had planned.

Two things struck me about the run:

1. Outdoor advertising is really noticeable to the 25,000 running the race and probably to the thousands of people watching (thanks for the cheering--it really helped). Something makes me think this particular type of advertising is on the expensive side on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis, but the impact should not be underestimated.

2. Running a marathon for the first time is not unlike putting together a good marketing plan.

I took a lot of the same steps in preparing to run a marathon that I would in marketing. I started with a clear goal. I read about other people who had accomplished the goal and used existing tools to set my expectations and revise my goal for realism. I set out a schedule to accomplish the goal using existing templates from respected sources and adjusting them to my purposes instead of starting from scratch. I researched the best online tools to help me on my way, started with the free ones to save money, and adjusted my tool usage based on my needs along the way (such as paying for professional medical help for my knees about 80% of the way through the training). I purchased strategic assets necessary to move forward (such as toe caps to keep my toenails from falling off) and leveraged existing information online and from experts to solve problems (such as getting the best knee-strengthening training exercises).

It is amazing what one can accomplish with planning and a lot of effort. When all was said and done, the marathon was hard but a good match for my expectations at the start of the race. If I compare my approach to some of the flailing around I have witnessed in marketing departments I have consulted to in the past, I think matching expectations and achieving the goal is all you could ask of a big project.

Confusing Questionnaires

The new Disney movie Chimpanzee is out in theaters, and it got raves from CinemaScore, a market research firm that rates films based on feedback from opening night viewers. This approach ostensibly helps the studio decide how much additional money to put into advertising.

I saw a funny quote in a news article recently about the film:

On a curious note, 5 percent of CinemaScore participants said a main reason for attending the film was its "lead actor." Were they referring to the film's two lead apes? Or narrator Tim Allen? Even stranger, 1 percent listed "lead actress" as their reason for buying a ticket -- and that 1 percent gave the movie a harsh "B-" grade. Clearly those individuals were upset by the documentary's lack of actresses.

My take is this: this is a questionnaire problem, not a viewer confusion problem. Take a look at the CinemaScore questionnaire card as shown at Wikipedia. It reveals a very simple, paper-based form, the major features of which is a grade from "A" to "F" a la a student report card. From this card, I conclude the following things:

• The focus of the card is on the overall rating, suggesting that the other data will be less than perfect. This approach is appropriate for the purpose of the card but also subject to misinterpretation by uneducated interpreters. Conclusion: always be wary of the potential misinterpretation of your data once it gets out of your hands.
• The form of questionnaire and sampling technique (paper-based intercept survey) does not allow much flexibility for the interview, resulting in some strange question choices--hence the problem in the quote above about "lead actor." Conclusion: take survey results through the lens of how well the survey actually matches the customer behavior.
• The CinemaScore system purportedly does a good job of its primary purpose: predicting the box office success of films. Conclusion: don't necessarily change your market research approach because the data look skewed.

I learned this last lesson in spades when I helped to revise the Paint Consumers Research Program questionnaire a few years ago. The previous questionnaire had asked "brand purchased" as an open-ended question, resulting in some people saying they purchased Behr paint at Lowe's, where the brand is not currently available. We tried to fix this problem by prompting respondents to answer the store first and then showing only brands that were available through that store.

The new approach helped, but I only realized after we launched the survey that we failed to add a "don't know" option to both the store list and the brand list. Thus, if you chose "Lowe's" when you really shopped at Home Depot, you would not see "Behr" and potentially have some of the same confusion the original survey had. My take-away was to take care in the future not to dismiss automatically the results of a survey just because some of the results were skewed. Because sometimes the "fix" can cause new problems as well.