Does brand marketing work?

My last post talked about “So what is your brand?”  I received some very insightful comments that called for a follow-up.  In the age of reboots and sequels, here’s mine.

One recurring comment that I received is that advertising can be funny and clever.  They remember the humor, but don’t remember the product or company that it represents.  A very valid point.  One of the key objectives in brand marketing is to get the prospect to remember who you are and what you sell.  It defeats the purpose if you spend a lot of money on brand advertising and no one remembers your brand.

When I was growing up in Northeast Ohio, there was a commercial that had a jingle that I can never forget.  It was for the Aluminum Siding Corporation.  They would play that jingle at the end of every commercial so you remembered their phone number.  Garfield 1-2323, Garfield 1-2323.  Until I found one of their commercials on YouTube, I haven’t heard that commercial in over 40 years, but I still remembered it as if it was yesterday.  That is an example of effective marketing.

How often have you seen a funny or cute ad but just couldn’t remember what product they were selling?  I’m going to conduct a little branding test.  See how well you do.   Some of the tag lines are new and others not so new. Can you name the product that goes with the taglines below?

1. Tastes Great.  Less Filling.

2. You Deserve A Break Today.

3. The Ultimate Driving Machine.

4. Just Do It.

5. Don’t Leave Home Without It.

6. We Try Harder.

7. Got Milk?

8. There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy.  For Everything Else, There’s **********.

9. A Diamond Is Forever.

10.  The Few. The Proud. The *******.

The best branding provides a memorable image or jingle that evokes some sort of emotion.

Hats off to Anheuser-Busch for this tribute to our armed forces.  The ad was very moving.  People going about their business in a busy airport gets silenced by the sound of applause by one person, then others for the soldiers getting off their plane. The use of dramatic music builds on the emotion.  The “Thank You” graphic over the soldier looking back, then the Budweiser logo. Budweiser wasn’t selling beer in this commercial.  Budweiser was selling national pride and appreciation for our men and women in the Armed Forces.  The Budweiser brand is not only beer, but they appreciate our military.  By the way, those military and their families probably purchase beer.  I wonder what brand they are going to purchase?

Some branding marketing doesn’t work.  When Oldsmobile was trying to convince the market in the late 80’s that those large square cars that appealed most to retirees were also a young person’s car, that was too much of a stretch for the market to accept.  This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.  Oldmobile limped along until April 29, 2004 when it phased out of existence.

When done well, brand marketing is very effective.  Having a good value proposition, fair pricing, excellent quality and customer service, and a strong branding message all working together will give your brand a long and prosperous future.  

 

So what is your brand?

“It’s not just a good time, it’s Miller Time.” – Miller

“15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.”– Geico

A talking baby that makes sound online business investments. – ETrade

“It’s good to be bad.” – Jaguar

A puppy wants to make friends with a clydesdale. – Budweiser

So what is your brand?

Companies spend millions upon millions of dollars on advertising and marketing so you can remember their brand.  Whether it’s TV or radio commercials, print ads, pay-per-click, banner ads, direct mail fliers, eblasts, trade shows, billboards or social media advertising, we are bombarded with brands. Branding is important.  I think the former Chairman and CEO of Harley-Davidson summarized the power of marketing very well by saying “It’s not hardware; it is a lifestyle, an emotional attachment.  That’s what we have to keep marketing to.”  Even more profound, he also said “Most people can’t understand what would drive someone to profess his or her loyalty for our brand by tatooing our logo onto his or her body — or heart.”  That’s the core of branding.  When your customers become so attached to your brand that it becomes their brand…it becomes personal.

Branding goes beyond products or companies.  Everyone has a brand.  My brand is that I am a “branding, synchronized marketing and ecommerce expert.”  That’s what I do and that’s who I am, at least corporately.  From a personal standpoint, I’m a happily married man of 29 years, a father of five wonderfully unique children and four dogs.  That’s my personal brand.

If you look around you from a branding perspective, ask yourself…why do I purchase the brands that I purchase?  Is it the quality?  Is it the reliability?  Is the the same brand my friends or family like?  What is it about the brands I use that make them unique and personal to me?  In my opinion, a marketer has truly succeeded with his or her brand, if the transition from the customer’s perspective happens from the marketer’s brand to my brand.

One personal example I can give about the personal nature of branding was when Coca-Cola created a product called “New Coke” that was supposed to directly compete with Pepsi by replacing the “Old Coke”.  My brother-in-law is one of the most Coca-Cola brand loyal people I have ever met.  He not only loves the product, he has t-shirts, lamps, cups, and other promotional Coke products.  On April 23, 1985 when New Coke was introduced and Old Coke was stop being produced, he was very upset as were millions of other old Coke (or as it would later be called “Coke Classic”) drinkers.  Coca-Cola underestimated the power of their own brand and customer brand loyalty.  When customers attach themselves to your brand, don’t mess with it.  Learn from it.

Email Marketing – The List, the list, the list

There are a few things that I have learned in my career about email marketing that I would like to share.  I have purchased email lists from list providers, partnered with trade advertisers to message their email database, imported lists from trade show attendees, and built our own email database to brand our company and market our products.  I will touch on each method and discuss the pros and cons for each.

Purchasing email lists from list providers is one method of hitting a very large list for a small amount of money.  The challenge here is making sure you are hitting the audience who is purchasing your products.  We did several eblasts with a large list provider who promised us that their list was outstanding and the emails were correctly categorized in the proper SIC/NAICS codes.  I found out very quickly that two things were untrue.  First, the list wasn’t properly categorized and second that the list wasn’t good to begin with.  We received “customer” inquiries from email recipients who were supposed to be manufacturing companies. Some were marketing companies that would never purchase our products.  Others were emails of retirees that haven’t worked in manufacturing for over 10 years. And of course, some of them were dead. It’s hard to get ROI from a dead person unless you own a funeral home.  When purchasing lists, be careful that you don’t get sucked into the hype of how good their lists are.  The reality of the situation is that people add and change email addresses frequently.  Ask yourself, how many different email addresses do I have?  Our customers are like us.  You probably have a personal account or two, a work account, and possibly a family email address. Keeping email databases clean, categorized correctly and up-to-date is quite an investment.  Test samples of the list to see if they convert before you purchase.  $.03 – $.05 per email sounds appealing, but if you get 0.00% conversion like I have in the past, what have you gained?

I have also utilized trade publication’s email databases.  It has been my experience that the conversion rate on these databases is better than huge list providers, but they are more expensive.  Think about it.  If you advertise in a trade publication that is read by your customers, you know already that the list is at least targeting the right audience.  They still may not purchase from you, but at least you have a fighting chance with the right list.  Your advertising partners will probably not sell you or give you their lists, but they will blast your custom email with your message to their list.  Like the purchased email list providers, test the list and see if it works for you.

You can also import trade show sign-up or attendee lists and market to them.  The lists are usually reasonably priced and you can import them into your house lists.  The challenge here is not everyone who signs up for a trade show attends.  We have found that sometimes an administrative assistant signs up his or her company on their behalf, but doesn’t attend and probably won’t buy your products.  Purchasing an attendee list is probably a better idea, however sometimes high schools take field trips to trade shows and the attendees might be 14-years-olds and may not purchase your products unless you sell PlayStation or XBox video games.  These types of lists  have worked well for me in the past.  Make sure you de-dupe the list as you might already have them in your database.

I prefer building and maintaining my own email database, however I do supplement with outside lists to expand my market penetration.  It doesn’t take long to build your own database if you include your existing customers with their permission (opt-in or opt-out).  If you regularly provide white papers, webinars or CAD drawings for downloading, that’s another effective way of building a customer or prospect database.  The key to this method is to make sure you have dedicated staff that cleans, de-dupes and updates the database.  Email databases are dynamic and ever-changing.  If you maintain your email database, you will be pleased with your results.

Remember, whether you purchase large email lists, work with advertising partners to blast your message to their list, import trade show attendee lists or build your own, the key is your email marketing is only as good as the list that it’s targeting.

Does business intelligence on the web increase sales?

When Amazon launched, everyone seemed to be amazed with their business intelligence system that offered other products they might want to purchase.  This isn’t rocket science and anyone can build a database that offers related products.  If you purchase a hammer, the upsell could be nails. What the business intelligence system and the company of the same name that they originally implemented was called Net Perceptions or Net P.  This system did not offer related product, although it could. The system would analyze purchasing data of customers and provide recommendations of products that are purchased when certain other products are purchased.  I’m not certain if Amazon is still using the Net P engine or something else today, but they still use upsells, bundles and product referrals.

Using the same example as above, customers that purchase hammers might also purchase men’s dress slacks.  They have nothing to do with each other, but they are often purchased together.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you go to the grocery store to buy milk, you don’t always buy cereal, although they go together.  You might buy tomato sauce, apples and hot dogs.  The Net P engine would offer those products.  This technology is called “collaborative filtering”. There were some other whistles and bells included in the software like monitoring purchases of customers and when they were due to reorder, the engine would alert the sales rep so they could ask the customer if they wanted to reorder product.

At one place where I was employed, we integrated Net P into our web site, call center and direct sales smartphones.  We increased sales by $4.5 million dollars that year due to upsells.  It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  We also had a unified effort to get more customers purchasing online, offered incentives for the customer service and sales personnel and our executive management “encouraged” everyone to be on board.

I moved on in my career and had another opportunity to integrate the same technology at another place of business several years later.  The businesses were similar, but not the same. Interestingly enough, the business intelligence engine failed miserably the second time.  Why? One reason was the economy.  When we implemented the BI engine the first time, the economy was doing very well.  Spending money on upsells wasn’t a problem.  Also, upselling on  the web was a relatively new thing.  Not many companies were doing it well, so we took advantage of the new technology.  The second implementation had not as favorable economic conditions, customers were getting upsold every place they went and customer fatigue became a factor.

Does business intelligence work on the web?  Absolutely.  Just ask Amazon.  Does it work all the time?  No.  You need to keep all of the factors in play including the economy, customer buying sentiment, and upsell fatigue when deciding to invest and implement online business intelligence. There are newer, more sophisticated toys in the business intelligence toy box today.  If you look at all of the economic implications and customer buying behavior, you can increase your sales using business intelligence.

Which Social Networks Should B2B Companies Use?

I have spent over 25 years in branding, marketing, sales and project management. The marketing landscape has changed significantly over the years. Early in my career, direct mail, magazine, radio, newspaper and television advertising were the marketing communication methods of choice. With the introduction of the internet, smartphones and other electronic media, localized advertising and marketing quickly migrated to global reach. Social Media entered the marketing channel arena quietly as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube and others came on the scene to fulfill the needs of each of their niches. As Facebook did when it originally was created for college students, it quickly expanded to fill a much larger need in the marketplace. This story seems to be repeated with other niche social networking channels.

For the longest time, the feeling in the B2B marketspace was that social media was really a B2C tool and had no place in the B2B market. That cannot be any further from the truth. Understanding our customers purchasing behaviors, likes and dislikes, market trends, etc. are key to being a successful marketer. The old stereotype is true…you can learn more about what’s going on in town in the “beauty shop” or “barber shop” than anywhere else. You need to go where customers are talking about your products and your competitors products. Social Media is the new gathering place for existing and future customers.

Cooper Smith from Business Insider presented some very telling charts in his article “CHARTS: The Most Important Social Networks To B2C And B2B Marketers” which compares the social media networks of B2B versus B2C customers. As you can see from the charts below, the B2B social networks of choice are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Google + and YouTube.

 

Based on some other articles that I have read, Pinterest and SlideShare are gaining momentum in B2B.

Focus on the social media networks where your customers are. Based on this research, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogging sites like WordPress, Google + and YouTube are great places to start.

 

Illustration by Geraldo Obieta  @G_Obieta