Category: Branding

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

Many years ago, I signed up for a Discover card for some very specific reason (it may have been in connection with buying an appliance from Sears, which owns Discover). I use this card so rarely that at least twice, when I’ve received replacement cards, I noticed that I had never bothered to activate the one that was about to expire.

So I was extremely amused to get a very hypey 4-page mailer—it looks like the copywriter studied all the greats and completely misunderstood the lessons—that begins (bolding and underline in original—see picture),

Headline of the lying letter from Discover
Headline of the lying letter from Discover

YOU’RE ABOUT TO BE REWARDED …
The Loyalty You’ve Demonstrated
The Past 14 Years Has Earned
You This Exclusive Invitation.

How Exclusive? Fewer Than
One Discover® Cardmember In Five
Is Receiving This Mailing.

And then it goes on to tell me I qualify for fast-track balance repayment that could shave a year and several thousand dollars off my repayments.

What’s wrong with this picture? Let me count the ways:

  1. As I mentioned, I’m not a loyal customer. I don’t even keep this card in my wallet. So I don’t believe the copywriter’s attempt to make this offer sound exclusive.
  2. Even if this were my primary card, I’m not exactly bowled over to learn that 20 percent of a user base in the millions is getting the offer. Exclusive? Ha ha ha.
  3. One more way to assure me this is nothing resembling the exclusive offer it pretends to be: the invitation code (required to participate in the program)—is 23 characters long, not counting hyphens.
  4. The lack of segmentation—OK, so this is the mailing manager’s fault, rather than the copywriter’s—is appalling. I never carry a balance. On ANY of my credit cards. I use them as 20- to 50-day access to funds without accruing interest, an easy way to track my purchases and save on postage (by paying one bill on line rather than a bunch of bills with mailed checks), and oh yes, a way to get air travel by accumulating frequent-flyer points for stuff I was going to buy anyway. So under any circumstances, I’m not even in the target market for this “exclusive” offer.
  5. The text of the letter is actually a strong argument against running up credit-card balances. It shows just how much this costs—something many consumers barely think about. The takeaway I get from this letter is don’t buy what you can’t afford, and pay your bills on time and in full, as I do, so you never pay these exorbitant charges.
  6. The meme of “make 2015 the year you took control” is ludicrous. You want to take control of your credit card debt? Pay off your balance and stop running it higher. Switching from five to four years of repayment servitude doesn’t cut it.
  7. Finally, the visual layout is a real turn-off. The thing is just drowning in too much bold, too much underlining (and the underlining is inconsistent—either underline the individual words or the phrases including the spaces, but don’t mix them), too many call-outs in a fake-handwriting font (does the designer really think we’re going to be fooled by the slight bowing in the underline?).
  8. Page 1 of the lying letter from Discover
    Page 1 of the lying letter from Discover

    Oh, yeah, on page two, which is even more cluttered with bold, underlining, and “handwritten” pull-outs, a footnote mentions that not everybody gets the spiffy 6.99% APR that “Jim” gets. Some people are going to pay usurious rates of up to 18.99%—YIKES!

It’s letters like this that give marketers a bad name.

This letter actually did inspire me to take action. First, I’m writing this blog. I get to use them as an example of how not to do direct mail. And second, I’m finally going to cancel my Discover card. I don’t choose to do business with companies that lie to me.

By the way, if you’d like marketing that doesn’t scream, doesn’t lie, addresses its exact target audience and effectively differentiates your products and services, give me a call at 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m., US Eastern Time) or drop me a note. I make my living as a marketing and profitability consultant, with particular emphasis on green/socially conscious, businesses, independent small business, and authors/publishers.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In yesterday’s post, “Does Making Decisions Lower Our Math Skills?” I looked at Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day.” He describes why President Barack Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day. Yesterday, I looked at the part of Petrone’s article that supported Obama’s reasoning, claiming that too many decisions weaken our brains. I took issue with that, as you’ll see if you click through.

But I’m basically in agreement with the other part of Petrone’s article: there can indeed be solid branding reasons behind keeping a wardrobe choice to a bunch of identical black turtlenecks, as Jobs did. For jobs, the black turtleneck made a lot of sense, for several reasons:

  • It’s sleek and modern looking, like Apple’s product line (at least if you stay trim, as Jobs did)
  • It reinforces the “think different” culture at Apple, a company that has built its brand from the beginning on not being the corporate-zombie persona that wears conventional business attire and buys conventional (IBM) computers; the very first Macintosh ad said, “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

So now, let me jump into uncharted (and maybe shark-infested) waters: let’s look at President Obama’s wardrobe choice from a branding perspective. And let’s start by looking at the wardrobe choices of his own bed partner, First Lady Michelle Obama.

Michelle’s fashion choices for formal occasions are quite dramatic. Typically her outfits combine three elements: they’re bold, elegant, and surprising. She’s the most fashionista First Lady I can remember, surpassing even Jacqueline Kennedy.

Her husband Barack Obama, however, tends to dress “safe,” in conservative dark suits. When he wore a sharp-looking tan suit, he was heavily criticized—but I thought it was a good move, though years too late. (In fairness—the commentator who started it all said he didn’t care that the suit was tan, but he didn’t think it fit properly.) Still, in typical Barack Obama fashion, he retreated with his actions and went back to his power suits.

The problem is, those “safe” dark suits are at odds with the brand of his 2008 campaign: “change.” The boldness of his rhetoric wasn’t matched by the drab sameness of his attire.

I empathize with him. I don’t spend a lot of energy thinking about the clothes I wear, and I usually dress for comfort. I’m not particularly comfortable in suits and abhor neckties. But I do wonder—and here’s the big heresy:

Would President Barack Obama have had an easier time pushing an agenda of “change” if he had dressed the part?

If, starting on the campaign trail in 2007, he had emphasized Michelle Obama’s three wardrobe attributes of boldness, elegance, and surprise, would he have been better able to marshall support for his initiatives? Is the conformist wardrobe secretly saying “I’m not serious about change”?

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, General Commentary, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an odd one: Paul Petrone’s article, “The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day,”  describes why President Obama (to simplify his day) and Steve Jobs (to brand himself) wear similar outfits day after day—and then supports Obama’s reasoning, saying that too many decisions weaken our brains. It’s gotten more than 1000 comments.

Leaving aside the flaw in the Obama example—he’s often photographed wearing something other than a suit—let’s look at Petrone’s claim, based on an L.A. Times article, “Too many decisions can tax the brain, research shows,” that too many decisions can lower math skills:

Two college professors…both found that a person has a limited amount of brain power in a day, so the more decisions they have to make, the weaker their decision-making process becomes…

Vohs…asked a group of random people how many decisions they made that day, and then asked them a series of simple math questions. The more decisions they made in the day, the worse they did on the math questions.

I was instantly skeptical.  1) I’d guess the more we train our brain to make interesting, challenging, important decisions, the more of those we empower it to make. But yes, if we fill our brains up with trivial decisions, we limit them.

And 2) there are many different kinds of decisions. Exercising critical thinking skills–or for that matter, intuitive snap judgments a la Gladwell’s “blink” theory–might actually boost our math performance. Other types of decisions could sharpen or weaken our math performance.

So I went back to the original article. The logic is far more nuanced than Petrone implies. What’s fatiguing is not how many decisions we make, but overwhelming choice in a single decision:

…When people have too many decisions to make — consumers end up making poor decisions, are more dissatisfied with their choices or become paralyzed and don’t choose at all.

And as the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to look for ways—often erroneous—to simplify the choosing process. If there are 100 kinds of cereal, instead of looking at all of the characteristics, people will evaluate a product based on something familiar, such as brand name, or easy, such as price.

Now this actually does make sense. Marketers know fewer choices = more purchases.

Come back tomorrow for a look at the branding (Steve Jobs) part of Petrone’s argument. (Subscribe to this blog so you’ll be notified.)

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