Category: Marketing Trends/News

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Diversity, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Hands down, my favorite commercial of the Olympics so far–and in fact my favorite TV commercial of the last several years, in any context–is Nike’s “Find Your Greatness: Jogger” (The full transcript,and the one-minute video, are at that link.)

The entire video is an overweight kid running at the camera, starting quite some distance out. Working hard, but not being fazed.

When I saw it on TV, I thought it was an  60-something overweight man. Looking again, I see it’s a kid. But the message of empowerment is the same.

Especially when the voiceover says (in part),

Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift reserved for a chosen few, for prodigies, for superstars, and the rest of us can only stand by watching.

You can forget that.

Greatness is not some rare DNA strand, not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing.

As a somewhat overweight guy who will be 60 in five years–and who has lost 15 pounds since upping my daily exercise regime from 30 to 60 minutes, to 60 to 120 minutes. The ad resonates with me. And not a lot of ads do.

 

 

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Just found this great article on traditional, marketer-driven outbound (“push”) marketing versus consumer-driven inbound (“pull”) marketing—and it had a really good insight I want to share with you:

Whereas outbound marketing often provided consumers with fantasies (think of Budweiser commercials or luxury car ads,) inbound marketing provides consumers with facts. People aren’t researching and gathering information on what fantasy a company is trying to sell them on, they are researching the efficacy of their products, and (with ever-growing regularity) the social and environmental policies of specific brands.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in pull marketing, in putting the consumer in the driver’s seat to actively seek out solutions and find you. All the way back in 1985, when I published my first marketing book, I talked about effective Yellow Pages presence. Yellow Pages was the web browser of its time, a way to seek out and compare all the providers of a service and make a decision based on who could serve you best. By the time I did my most recent (sixth) marketing book, the award-winning and category-best-selling Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I devoted significant space to inbound/pull strategies, from social media to Internet discussion groups. This kind of marketing is not at all intrusive; in fact, it’s welcomed.

But the insight that the reason it works so well is that it’s based in fact rather than fantasy is something I’ve never articulated. And I find it particularly interesting because the common marketing wisdom is that emotions do the selling, and intellect serves only to justify the purchase to others. I’ve never believed that; I have said for years that the best selling uses both emotion and rationality, complementing each other. To put it another way, selling is much easier when the buyer has both the need and the desire. Either one by itself is rarely enough to close a purchase.

By coincidence, I’m reading a book right now that says businesses don’t need to advertise—but it makes a huge exception for directory listings (including Yellow Pages and search engine ads). I was having trouble with that differentiation, until I read this article. Now I finally understand what the authors are getting at: advertising = fantasy, while listings = fact.

I’m not sure I agree, but at least now I see where they’re coming from.

What do you think—and feel—about this? Please share below.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

A blogger on Sustainable Business, Marc Stoiber, wonders why a major sustainability milestone achieved by Translink, the Vancouver, British Colombia transit system, went almost unnoticed by local and national media.

The funny thing is…transit systems control their own media, one that reaches the two most important audiences they have. If I were the company’s marketing director, I’d put inside placards on the front and back of both sides of every bus and subway (four signs in each car) to reach the actual riders—and exterior signage to reach the next-most-important constituency: Vancouver-area residents not yet using public transit.

The interior placards would not just brag about the accomplishment—they’d say thank you to the riders for their part. And those exterior signs would recruit new riders to join the tribe, e.g., “become part of the greenest commute in North America.” And I’d supplement this with a nice social media campaign, which itself could be a subject for exciting press releases, etc.

Then, the local media and perhaps the national media would almost certainly pick up the story—but even if they didn’t, the message would be out there, and if done right, ridership would grow.

Stoiber goes on to discuss the very creative marketing of another transit advocate, Jason Roberts—who put up a website for the a nonexistent light-rail transit line in Dallas, Texas called the Oak Cliff Transit Authority—and was able to organize so effectively around this public vision that the project actually got funded! You might call Roberts’ story “If You Dream It, They Will Come—IF You’re a Marketer and Organizer Who Can Create and Gather a Tribe.”

Vancouver Transit execs: I’d love to consult with you on how to build big awareness. I already have one Vancouver-based green company as a client.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Copywriting, language, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , ,

Yesterday, I blogged about the combination of vision, engineering, and marketing that made Apple and some other companies so successful. And for years, I’ve been a champion of putting reasons in your marketing.

This TED talk by Simon Sinek goes a step farther. Again using Apple as an example, he says it’s not enough merely to include the because; you want to lead with it. If you put your reasons why—your higher purpose—right at the top you immediately attract the people who are falling-all-over-themselves-eager to be part of your dream and your mission. This, he says, is why we don’t buy MP3 players or tablets from companies like Dell, but we salivate at Apple’s every product release—because Apple leads (and has led, since at least the original Macintosh introduction in 1984) with the deeper why.

Another of his examples is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; King, he notes, did not say, “I have a plan.”

However, King’s speech actually had a bit of a slow build. The first 351 words (of 881, total) are about the plight of black people in this country from the Emancipation Proclamation to the day 100 years later when he gave his speech. Only then, more than a third of the way into his speech, does he move into his vision of the race-neutral future.

Still, I think Sinek is right—but I think it also has to hit on the benefits to the individual, unless you’re speaking only to the driven. I’ve often used this technique in my copywriting without consciously thinking about it. From now on, I will do it consciously.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Networking, People Helping People, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

  • Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
  • For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
  • The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Trends/News

Sometimes, the secret of great marketing is to completely reinvent a business model.

Here’s Next, a Chicago restaurant that turned itself into a prepaid high-end supper club, selling out every ticket at $130 to $220, not counting your drinks.

There are no slow nights at Next, as every seat has been sold in advance, and thus no issues of cash flow. Tickets are nonrefundable, just as at the opera or the ballpark.

Customers create an account on the restaurant’s Web site and ask to be notified by e-mail when new tickets are available. When they are, the buyers return to the Web site to choose a date, time and table price. Then they pay.

If tickets are still available, that is. They go in seconds.

To the owners of this restaurant, the recession does not exist. They are providing an experience unobtainable anywhere else, and people are beating down the door.

Thanks to @TroyWhite for sharing the link.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, language, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Want to buy a scientist?

When you find a scientist who claims to show that human-caused catastrophic climate change either isn’t real or isn’t a problem or doesn’t really exist, you usually find a money trail leading to one of the worst polluters (usually, oil giant ExxonMobil, sometimes, petrochemical magnates and right-wing darlings Koch brothers).

But ultra-right-wing think-tanks play in this sandbox too. Friday, TriplePundit posted leaked secret anti-climate-change strategy documents from Heartland Institute; they actually have the chutzpah to put $100,000 toward developing a K-12 school curriculum to

…show that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

Oh yes, and they’ve also set aside $18,000 a monthly to fund pundits who present the climate-change-is-not-a-problem viewpoint.

Hmm, that sounds a lot like the attempts by creationists to throttle the study of evolution and biology. When science can’t back up your position, influence young kids with the Big Lie technique that was so beloved by Nazi propagandists. And the get television news commentators to present a “fair and balanced” approach, pitting your purchased experts against objective scientists as if they were equally credible, and sow doubt in the public mind.

To climate skeptics, I say “look out the window.” In my own area of Western Massachusetts alone, we’ve experienced the following just since June 1:

None of these events are the normal weather pattern around here.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Publishing, Uncategorized

This is a guest post by Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, in a rebuttal to Amazon’s latest blow against independent bookstores: getting its customers to spy on them for price checks and then buy online. Remember: when big dogs attack, we are stronger in a circle than standing alone.

Here’s Edward now.
—Shel Horowitz

Amazon.com wants you to browse your local bookstore to find the books you want, then go to Amazon.com to see if you can get them cheaper online. Why not turn the tables? Go ahead and browse the reviews on Amazon.com to find books that might interest you—then order them from your local bookstore, where there are no shipping charges and you can pick books up at your convenience without having to wait at home for a delivery.

The links from both my own Web site (Hasbrouck.org) and my publisher’s site for my book series (PracticalNomad.com) go to Powells. if you sign up as a Powells.com “affiliate”, and include the appropriate code in your links, you also get a cut of sales referred from those links. Small, but royalties on book sales are also small, and every penny helps. It took some effort to get my publisher to link from their site to Powells.com for my books instead of Amazon.com (their default), but eventually they agreed.

You can also create direct links for a specific book from Indiebound/Booksense, a joint online marketing effort of local independent bookstores. If someone follows the link, they can find out what store has the book in stock nearby, or request that a copy be sent to a store near them for pickup. And as with Powell’s, you sign up with them as an affiliate to get a small referral commission.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

This is a reminder of two critical concepts for the coming years:

1. Money is not a goal; it is a means of accomplishing something. While having more money means you can purchase the goods or services you want, there are often other ways to accomplish the goal.

2. Buying stuff is not the only way to accomplish something.

Here’s a look at how to leverage other  methods of getting your needs met and your wants fulfilled.

Zipcar just commissioned a study on the sharing habits of Millennials, showing that they are more willing to share not just cars, but a wide range of resources, than their parents and grandparents.

That may be true of the majority culture, but there are plenty of us older folks who know a good thing when they see it. I’ve been lifelong practitioner of this sort of approach, and a public advocate all the way back to at least 1995, when I published my fourth book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist. I’m turning 55 on Saturday, and here are some among many sharing experiences I’ve had over the years:

  • As a college student in Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1973-76, I became aware of a mostly Quaker community called The Vale. Instead of everyone going out and buying a lawnmower, they pitched in and bought a communal tractor.
  • In 1990, when laser printers cost several thousand dollars, I organized a co-op and brought in a bookstore owner, a community activist, and a magazine publisher to share the costs of purchasing one (it lived at my house, since I organized it).
  • As a member of Servas since 1983 and Couchsurfing since 2009, I’ve shared my home with strangers traveling through, and received hospitality form others on three continents.
  • My neighbors, a Republican mainstream farm family, constantly drive each other’s vehicles. The question seems to be what’s the best car, truck, or tractor for the task, and not who owns it.
  • Two decades ago, I was on the board of a group called Homesharing in Hampshire County: a mainstream social service agency that matched up people with extra space in their homes (often elders in need of both companionship and home/property maintenance) with people who needed a place to live.
  • Thirty years ago, I lived in a community in West Philadelphia (a place with good public transit), where three or four cars were shared among about 120 people, as needed, and users paid a small fee per mile to cover costs. When we needed to make a supermarket run or fill our water jugs (we all hated the municipal water, so we self-bottled 50 gallons at a time at a spring in the next town), we borrowed one of the communal cars. Most of this community lived in group housing: six or eight people sharing a big old Victorian. It worked out very nicely.
  • For a decade at least, Freecycle has provided a formal structure to get rid of stuff you no longer need by passing it on to someone else, or to get something you need without having to buy it.

The article, in The Atlantic, also linked to a cool website (and concept) called Collaborative Consumption, which may be increasingly important as we try to turn the world green.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , , ,

There’s dumb, and there’s dumber, and then there’s really dumb.

Sometimes, it takes an advanced degree to be really dumb. Like the lawyers who work for the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A. In their infinite wisdom, these lawyers apparently decided they own the phrase “eat more,” and went after EatMoreKale.com for trademark infringement.

Sorry, but this doesn’t wash. Coupling the words “eat” and “more” predates Chick-fil-A, I’m guessing, by about 1000 years. Chick-fil-A also deliberately misspells its slogan, which is actually appropriate for trademarking, because trademark law rewards unique spelling (yeah, trademark law is one reason for the dumbing down of our whole culture—but that’s a post for another day). Since its actual slogan is “EAT MOR CHIKIN,” the company might have a claim for “eat” followed by “mor” without the e at the end, all in caps.

But NOBODY except a very dumb lawyer can possibly confuse three cows on a white background, each holding a word of the thin, handlettered-looking misspelled Chick-fil-A slogan, with the thick black letters, bright green circle, and black background of EatMoreKale.com—any more than they’d confuse eating fast-food factory meat with kale.

Is it any wonder that people make so many lawyer jokes? Can somebody please tell the Chick-fil-A lawyers to get a life?

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