Does your packaging tell a story?

Does your packaging tell a story?

May 12, 2020 | Branding, Marketing

You can have the best product in the world, but if the packaging is inconsistent, out of place, bland, and does not accurately describe the product, or what a consumer might be expecting, it will not get bought.

Jeans and T-shirt will normally not get you entry to a black tie event!.

As I wander around supermarkets, I regularly see packaging that has  been designed to appeal to the designer, or perhaps  the product manager, rather than telling a story about the product to the consumer, the one being assailed by messages inside and outside the store.

The design may be artful, it might meet the regulatory standards, and it almost certainly has a logo prominent somewhere. However, does it stand out on shelf, does it deliver a message to a busy and stressed buyer who does not really care about your artful design, but just wants to get what she (and it is still almost always a she) needs, so she can get on with it, and get out of the store as quickly as possible.   

A really good test is to put a package in front of people who do not read English, and have a translator ask them to describe the product, and what benefit it delivers. Fail that test, and back to the drawing board you go.

Pack design is a part of a process, the make or break part when it comes to consumer trial.  Developing and launching a product, even a line extension is a significant investment, don’t you think it should be given the best chance possible to succeed, to be selected off the shelf, and to deliver a return?

Next time do not do the pack design at the end of the development process, do it at the beginning. Sending it out to a ‘designer’ at the end of the development process, looking for a quick turnaround and cheap price,  could end up being the most expensive piece of design you ever did. Failure to grab attention, and encourage customer trial will make that cheap, quick, but artful pack design, a really dumb idea.   

When you need help thinking this all through, call me.

PS. Bet nobody nicks my grandaughters lunch again!!

 

An extreme case of Marketing Alchemy: Bananas!

Mar 11, 2020 | Branding, Marketing

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan may have set a new world record. He taped a banana to a wall in an art exhibition in Florida on December 7, 2019, which was then sold for $120,000 (US) dollars.

The buyers, Billy and Beatrice Cox acknowledged the absurdity, but supported the impact the taped banana had on conversations about art.  As a marketer, I am in awe of the process by which Cattelan turned a perfectly ordinary banana, into a cash cow.

Marketing alchemy at work.

A competitive artist at the exhibition ensured the banana would not go off, by eating it. An act of sabotage, or extension of the publicity the ‘thingo’ (I have difficulty calling it art, or even exhibit) generated.

Nevertheless, it is a massive demonstration of the contextual impact on the perceived value of an object.

You can buy an Eric Clapton signature Stratocaster for a couple of grand, new, or had you been at Christies in New York on June 24, 2004, you would have seen Eric’s Stratocaster (nicknamed ‘Blackie) that was the mainstay of his playing during the heydays of ‘Cream’, sold for $959,500. Better value than a banana, at least you could have resold it, rather than have some goose run up and eat it. 

All this proves, once again, that utility has little to do with value.

Update: November 2024. The monkeys have really come out to play. The original buyers of this ‘art’ the Cox’s sold it subsequently for 184k, on-sold twice more for 150k and 230k. It has now been sold again at an auction in new York for 6.2 million according to a video in X. (which I always believe to be the truth..???). The absurdity of this is disturbing, Every few days the thingo has a new banana added,  presumably to keep the ‘art’ fresh. I have never heard of such marketing alchemy as this! https://tinyurl.com/w7ma9fvx

Marketing technology. Master or servant?

Mar 4, 2020 | Communication, Marketing

 

 

This is a story of two modest sized SME clients.

One has spent a lot of time, effort and money building a marketing technology ‘stack’, to use the vernacular. The expectation was that it would deliver significant marketing productivity, which they defined pretty well with a range of measures.

The other uses a basic system to record customer contacts and follow ups, as well as a semi manual system to create, collect and collate information, or ‘content’,  combined with social platforms and their website for lead generation.

The first client, with the sophisticated system has a tiger by the tail. The technology is ruling them, is unrelenting, unforgiving, and prone to drive them down dead ends because their data input is patchy  and sometimes flawed. Their recognition is that after all the effort, they are  little  better off than before the technology, just lighter in the pocket, and wearing people out.

The second client is struggling with the processes, particularly the manual interventions required, and the personal level of engagement necessary. There is frustration as they are continually told, ‘all this should be automated’ ,  but when you look at the total cost of conversion, share of wallet, lifetime value and referrals, they are much better off.

The question then is the extent to which the software is serving the purpose to which it has been directed, vs. serving itself. The intervention of people has been removed, automated, and the automation does not give a fig about the human interactions that make relationships, it just needs to be fed data.

Greek philosopher  Sophocles is quoted to have said, ‘nothing vast enters out world without a curse’ , and never has that reported quote been truer than when we consider the automatic responses we all have to the digital triggers now prevalent in our lives.

Give me back some of the humanity, with all its ambiguity and nuances any day.

So, as you are considering automation of your revenue generation processes,  never forget to account for the fact that people do business with people, in strong preference to algorithms, which are just tools.

 

 Header cartoon, Courtesy XKCD

The core problem of calculating a return on an investment in marketing.

Feb 24, 2020 | Management, Marketing

Return on Investment is a very simple financial equation.

What you earned, minus what you spent, divided by what you spent.

Earn $100 after spending $75, divided by the $75, and you have a  33% ROI. Put another way, for every dollar you spend, you get back $1.33.

Simple, right?

Then why do marketers seem to have so much trouble convincing the corner office that investing in marketing is a sound strategic and commercial choice.

Simple answer: Attribution.

Which part of revenue, or margin earned, depending on how you want to measure the success or otherwise of an investment, is attributable to the spending of the money?

Let’s take a simple and very common example: building a website.

Every business these days is told they need a website, not having one is like not having a phone, it simply makes doing business next to impossible.

 Let’s look at the formula to try and pick clean the bones of the calculation.

What you spent:

  • You need resources to determine the form and scope of the website.
  • You need someone to write the copy, and take or source the photos and illustrations.
  • You may need subscriptions to items supporting the website, such as CRM integrations, analytics services, pop-ups, autoresponders, and on, and on, and on.
  • You may need resources to manage and ‘clean’ the data bases that appear on the site, such as product specifications, promotional deals, customer and lead management, and on, and on, and on.
  • Finally, you need resources to build and maintain the website.

All of these resources can be sourced from external parties, in which case you can track invoices, or from internal resources, in which case all you have to do is determine what part of their employee costs you need to attribute to this website development. Simple to say, hard to do.

What you earned:

If anything, this is harder than attributing costs to a website development project.

  • What part of the revenue, or margin, whichever you choose as the benchmark, can you attribute to the cost of the website, and which part goes to the sales force, the quality of the product, the photography on the website, the manner in which you follow up enquiries, how  you capture returns, the cleanliness of the delivery truck belting around suburban streets, and on, and on, and on.
  • Over what time frame do you measure the return? A week, a month, a year, the duration of the associated advertising campaign, the lifetime of a customer?
  • How do you factor in other marketing activities, advertising on traditional media, digital ads, the weight of your distribution, the quality of the targeting of activity to real potential customers Vs the tyre-kickers. And on, and on, and on.
  • How do you include the value or otherwise of the word of mouth, or organic reach on social media? Which social media do you include in these considerations, is it just Facebook and twitter?  What about LinkedIn, or if you are a ‘techo’, GitHub, or Reddit, or the networks of gamers, and on and on, and on.

The core question is, ‘what do you include, and how do you allocate a weight to the contribution it made to the outcome?‘

Attribution.

Too add to  the confusion, people use a range of  terms interchangeably, usually because they do  not think about, or recognise the problems of attribution.

For example, they confuse return on marketing investment with return on advertising spend, and they  confuse leads generated with real financial results, and most particularly when confronted by someone flogging new and shiny digital toys, revenue with margin.

To go back to the metaphor at the beginning, a website is not anything like a telephone, so to make the comparison is  nonsense. A phone is a one dimensional tool. They all look the same, and do the same job, although the advent of smart phones has widened that scope considerably. A website by contrast is infinitely variable in what it does, looks like, and performs, and should be the product of a robust strategy and tactical implementation plans, not some simple template pulled out of a digital urgers kitbag.

To build that necessary credibility in the corner office, most probably occupied by an accountant or engineer, whose whole mind set is quantitative, you must be able to draw conclusions based on data. This data must demonstrate the cause and effect chains that exist, often  very well hidden, and avoid the marketing clichés and jargon, which just make you sound like that digital urger in the foyer.

Need help thinking about the implications of all that, call an expert.

 

The grassroots essentials of marketing

Feb 19, 2020 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

 

What do we mean by the term ‘marketing’?

I suspect if I did a poll, there would be a scarily wide range of responses. So, let me repeat the definition I have evolved over 45 years, which would not be found in any textbook.

‘Marketing is the identification, development, protection and leveraging of competitive advantage that adds value’

This is different from the ‘purpose’ of marketing, which to my mind is to create the opportunity and motivation that, when conditions are right, will build relationships and create opportunities, that lead to transactions. That transaction might be a sale, a subscription, a vote, a referral; it can be many things, with the common element that it is an outcome of the so called marketing activity.

Let me use the metaphor of the expert gardener. 

This gardener has a process by which he/she manages their gardens.

  • They decide what it is they want, what the end product should look like, at least in general terms.
  • They pick the ground they will cultivate.
  • They prepare the ground in the manner appropriate for the outcome they have visualised.
  • When conditions are right, they plant the seeds.
  • They nurture the seeds and resultant seedlings until they are ready to harvest.
  • They repeat the process, incorporating the things they learnt on the way through.

This process is the same for growing broadacre grain as it is for growing a few decorative flowers in the back yard. As it is for marketing. The process is the same whether the product is a tub of yoghurt or a power station, a national effort, or a local one. Only the scale of the investment, implementation details, and time frame differ. Try to take a shortcut, and you end up with dead flowers, or at best, substandard ones.

So how does that rather vague stuff translate into your world of marketing the products and services of your SME?

When I first encountered ‘Marketing’ at University, 50 years ago, the core of it was ‘The 4 P’s of marketing’. Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Everything sprang from those 4 elements. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and the expressions used may have changed a bit,  the processes of achieving them changed radically, but the core remains.

The architecture of the 4 p’s of marketing are a bit like the Model T Ford. It redefined the notion of the car, and how to manufacture it. Over time, the expression of the car has changed enormously, but the basic architecture remains.    

However, to me it makes sense to see ‘marketing’ from the perspective of the customer, and to do so, we need to answer a few simple questions:

  • What is the problem my customer has that I can solve with my product/service? This will answer the further question of why should my customer do business with me and not my opposition, which is all about the value you can create while being differentiated from the competition. You need to define it from the perspective of the customer. The costs, of all types, created by the problem, and the benefit to them of a solution.
  • Who is my ideal customer? Your ideal customer will see your differentiated value proposition, as being made for them. This takes focus and always hard choices about who you will service, and who you will not; it is the customer Pareto at work. If you have defined both the problem and the ideal customer, i.e. the one who has more of the problem, or feels it more acutely than most, when they see your value proposition, their instinctive response is ‘at last, this is for me’, or something similar.
  • How do I apply leverage to my marketing investment? It is at this point you are considering which messages, delivered to who, via what media, and how do you do that while getting the biggest bang for your buck possible. It is where the marketing rubber hits the road.
  • How do I make a profit? Profit is a simple equation: revenue minus cost.

Still the same four items, or ‘P’s, it is only the articulation and perspective that has changed. The primacy of the ‘p’s remains.

The common denominators in each of the four, required for success, are choice and iteration. You must make often very difficult choices, implement, learn from that experience, and apply the learning for the next iteration. This need to make choices, and enable the manner in which you deploy your modest marketing resources to evolve based on the experience, is perhaps the largest marketing hurdle for every SME I have ever seen. Many SME owners have had a bad experience with marketing snake oil, and are reluctant to try again, and others who have hit on something that seems to work are reluctant to change anything, so you get a lack of optimisation, not as much leverage as you could.  

As you consider your marketing, given the small scale of business, and budgets available, do not let your thinking be dominated by the mass models of the past. These are simply not appropriate for you. Way more appropriate are small, niche models, an artisanal approach. Why? We have become sceptical, untrusting, demand to know the real provenance, and only rely on those we know personally, and trust because they have earned that trust.

The original social media, word of mouth, subsumed by digital for the past 15 years is making itself heard again. Therefore it follows that you, the business owner, need to be seen and heard, tell your story, use the digital tools, but be personal and human. However, this does not mean you should turn your back on digital, by any means. The data and tools we have now could not have even been imagined 15 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. The practise of marketing has changed radically, the foundations remain the same, just way more exposed and subject to interrogation and automation than they were, and you have to be in there just to keep up.

As Einstein said, ‘Everything should be as simple as possible, no simpler’. What could be simpler than providing a great product and service that solves a problem, and having those problem liberated people tell their friends, and most particularly those with a similar problem? That is how to market at the grass roots.

 

 

 

Why most enterprises fail at cost effective marketing

Feb 17, 2020 | Management, Marketing

It is budget time again, that time of the year when planning comes to the fore, usually as an added job that is just a pain in the rear.

There is an easy way, and a hard way.

The easy way is to download a template and get the intern to spend a day filling in the gaps. About as useful as an umbrella in a cyclone.

Better than nothing, but only just.

Then there is the hard way, because it takes time, and requires you to use your brain, and the collective brains of others, and can be an emotional as much as analytical exercise, requiring time, energy, critical thinking, and collaboration, and making some really challenging choices.

Let’s define what we mean by marketing, useful if you are going to plan for it.

My definition of marketing is the ‘generation, development, leveraging and protection of competitive advantage’.

Not a definition you will find in any textbook, but mine evolved over 40 years of doing this stuff.

Competitive advantage evolves, and comes in many forms, but without it, you are in a commodity, price driven market, and you cannot win in that. The pace of evolution is these days frenetic, so writing a plan, and leaving it on the shelf for an occasional reference before the next budget session is useless. It has to be an evolving document.

If you can find a template that helps you do that, let me know.

Marketing is about the future, you are trying to shape it, so you are dealing with unknowns that can be qualified, but rarely quantified. With the use of various mental models, cause and effect, domain knowledge, customer intimacy, competitive understanding, tactical agility, and a whole range of other things, you can build a level of confidence that justifies the risks being taken.

It is a jigsaw puzzle, to which you do not have the picture, and many of the pieces you do have are wrong, and many are missing, so you have to experiment, make up your own, use someone else’s cast-offs, try making your own pieces to fit.

At the end, it is about making choices with imperfect information.

That is hard.

When faced with a choice that appears to be between two sub optimal outcomes, step back, and find another way. That is in itself a valid choice, and a very good one, and it makes you think.

The greatest two problems most corporates have in planning marketing are:

Extrapolation.

Confirmation bias.

Add 3% to last year, and, only seeing what they want to see.

That is what you get when you use a downloaded template in place of using your brain to critically assess options, information, domain knowledge, capabilities, resources, risk, and market and trend sensitive indicators.