Even if only once in your life while you’re spinning your wheels in thought, you come full circle to that enlightened focal point right on the pinwheel of your marketing message.
Grabbing the brass ring demands a repeat performance.
Spinning up to the next level has a well-rounded marketing pro dialing down the rhetoric generated at round table discussions. But, over inflating a first success keeps you out of the gold circle.
A blowhard on bigger wheels is not raising the bar.
Keep dialing up your standards with every marketing challenge. Let your competition spinout off-key–turning out flat tires.
Because re-inventing the wheel does not mean it has to be round.
It was only 300 pounds of sand. No fancy label. No slogan. I refilled my 4 year old twins’ sand box with 6 bags of it. They found more pleasure playing with the bags than the sand. If only they could articulate their glee.
“It’s the ding-dong place.”
On our way to Lowes, we crested a hill and my twins could see for half a mile down the road. From their car seats in the back they saw the far off Taco Bell sign – otherwise known as the ding-dong store. Brand recognition at an early age is fascinating to observe. I’m just relieved they weren’t born when the Chihuahua was its spokes dog. Or I’d hear…
Build strong youth brand loyalty.
At Lowes, they passed on getting new sand box toys in favor of more immediate gratification. Which is why it is essential to place a long-term commitment product next to the short-term commitment sugar-based product – giving into every parents’ immediate gratification for cursing under their breath.
Or not.
Imagination is key to perpetuate your brand.
But my twins will grow up – and I hope the kid stays in them.
I made them wings out of the sand bags so they could fly.
If you could eat 3 squares a day in a facility more luxurious like this than your home, you’d want to age up — or join mom and dad more often then you’d thought.
Now, tell your parents it’s only for 55+ like them and they will damn near disinherit you. People 55+ years don’t feel nor act their age.
They hold our purse strings.
By the year 2052, an estimated $40.6 trillion will change hands as Baby Boomers and their parents pass on their accumulated assets to their heirs. InsuranceJournal.com All they ask is to let them be their selves. How hard is that?
No assistance required.
Our parents value their independence. Yet, we tend to ignore them in our marketing plans. Big mistake. They have the cash. If your parents — and your markets – don’t sound like this, then let them go to market as much as they want to in order to velocitize the currency during this recession.
So, how old is old?
An informal poll among incoming college freshmen pegged their perceptions of old at the ripe age of 47 years.
If we shirk the need to include people 55+ in our plans, they won’t come again.
Ignoring opportunities to replace customers who are aging-out of your goods and services is both grotesque and irreligious.
When developing market strategies targeting new customers, your decisions need to rely on your unique brand position, its relation to your new customers and their needs, your competitive landscape and market trends, and the ever present constraints on current resources.
Companies who successfully reach new customer segments take a rigorous approach, and evaluate all considerations and issues. These are a few tools you already have to replenish your customer base:
Online: Social networking sites, such as Facebook, let you test different promotions and offers in real time. This quickly leads to an understanding of what products and messages played better with the new, younger demographics you’re targeting. Through Web analytics, you will gain a greater depth of insight into what drives their buying behavior with you.
Employees as Customers: Find those employees who meet the characteristics of your new, younger target audience. You can easily gain insights about their needs, test new marketing messages and get instant feedback.
Ethnographic Studies: When going after your new target customer, immerse yourself in their communities and lifestyles. These ethnographic studies will give you valuable insights on unmet needs, preferences, and motivations behind certain behaviors to prefer your brand. This video may not be suitable for all viewers.
Use Data You Already Have: Use your customer loyalty data in combination with attitudinal insight surveys to understand variables such as customer value, needs, attitudes, and desired benefits for them to prefer your brand. These variables will help you build multi-dimensional brand segmentation beyond just generic demographic segments.
This is a start towards grotesque and irreligious profits.
You have to admire an idea that pairs mundane low-tech garbage collection with high-tech RFID to pay us to recycle — and it’s as easy as taking out the trash. If they brought this idea to you, what would you have done?
If ideas were just round-filed and no one picked them up, would we have Twitter? iPhone apps? Starbucks? Air Guitar contests? Woodstock?
If Fred Smith listened to his Yale business professor when told his idea wouldn’t fly — there would be no overnight delivery from Fred’s FedEx concept. Or if these marketing executions were refused by the short-sighted, we wouldn’t be swayed by these integrated marketing executions right now:
When done right, recycling traditional media weight with today’s tech-savvy social media power can catapult your brand. It’s just a matter of how much weight you put on your marketing efforts.
After four years with Crispin Porter + Bogusky the Volkswagen account is up for review. This is unfortunate, but this happens when brand managers get bored and run out of patience in their faith for the brand – and its anthem.
“VW is the most underachieving car brand in the world. VW is always flirting with greatness but never achieving it. They’re big on creative, but VW also needs to deliver a message of stability and integrity,” Steffan Postaer, CCO, Euro RSCG-Chicago. I couldn’t have said it better.
Someone had the prescience to give VW this anthem. It embraces both VW’s problem and solution. And no one at VW is listening.
-Rough translation:
“Only if a car has embossed an era,
if it became an attitude to life,
and it gave a whole generation its name.
Only if a car isn’t only large,
but is full of greatness.
If it is a home for many families,
and lets everyone participate in its innovations.
If it doesn’t settle for records,
and creates new technologies
which afford new paths.
Only if a car thinks already of today
for tomorrow –
then it is das Auto.”
Apple lost faith in its brand – once. Apple set their sites on greatness with its “1984″ anthem (Its only daytime broadcast was January 22, 1984 during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.)
Apple then abandoned their faith (and agency) until 1998 when Steve Jobs was re-hired and became its official CEO, where he then introduced the iMac and PowerBook G3.
Give your brand’s anthem time to mature, and achieve faith with a solid following towards greatness. Let your competition lose faith and bring upon their own brand apocalypse.
Some seem intent on fostering the myth that the Internet is the province of the young, that online is an ineffective way to reach baby boomers and forgetting social media when thinking about older consumers.
The fact is that Internet usage among Baby Boomers is comparable to Internet usage by both Generation X and the Echo Boomers. Also, online baby boomers are more involved with certain aspects of the Web than younger consumers.
Sites such as Gather, BoomJ, Eons and TeeBeeDee are seeing success by building the communities a 60-year-old wants; focused on their needs and priorities. According to Quantcast, Boomj.com almost tripled their traffic from an average of 240K daily uniques in January 08 to almost 700K in July, a monthly average increase of 28%.
Simple demographics are a poor substitute for understanding online motivations, attitudes and behaviors. Our business is undergoing a massive transition from broad-based demographically driven initiatives to behaviorally focused, targeted marketing. And the Internet is fueling this shift.
“We might all hope that 1983 is a good year in all respects, 1983 standing alone, because it doesn’t need any troubles of its own. It will inherit enough from 1982, and none of them will go away at midnight this Friday. The year 1983, for example, will inherit a recession spread around the world – 12 million unemployed, the first soup kitchens we have seen in a generation. It will inherit a Washington establishment spending close to $200 Billion it does not have; a Congress that would like to bail itself out by raising taxes but can’t; a Social Security system that if not rescued will very soon run out of money; and various industries – automobiles, steel and so on – devastated by imports at least equal in quality but lower in price. And more. Our town here, Washington (DC), regardless of who is in power, cannot fix all of this. But after a generation of promising to solve every social economic ailment, it has led people to expect Washington solutions, and so it will try a number of them. The good news is that the mathematics of probabilities shows that if they try hard enough, sooner or later, by accident or otherwise, somebody will do something right. It does seem that it’s time, preferably in 1983, for the probabilities to go our way.”
– David Brinkley, ABC news program This Week with David Brinkley, aired December 26, 1982.
As the world’s economic history repeats itself from 27, 37 and 80 years ago, we’ve learned that an increase in marketing during times of recession can produce long-term gains that more than compensate for the required investment. Just make sure your marketing is well-grounded, and fertile ideas prevail.
It’s also fun to watch your competitors flinch as they wonder what’s next in your marketing bag of tricks – especially with the probabilities of success now in your favor. This is a movie concept promo site, it’s quite the teaser and leaves you wanting more, What’s in The Box?
Everything comes full circle – you need to find where it begins for you.
Top-of-mind awareness is an asset that will devalue faster than you can say ROI. In truth, awareness can decline as fast as 50% a month when you go silent, and the cost of buying back that awareness will be huge.
You need to encourage innovative ideas and exploration of new grounds if you expect to maintain a continuous growth cycle. Don’t spin your wheels. Welcome change. Welcome risk. It is how you succeeded in the first place.
Just because the economy is sadly wanting doesn’t mean your customers want to be reminded of their uneasiness. A little humor will be most appreciated by your otherwise stressed-out target. Now is the opportune time to unleash the laughter.
Your challenge of publicizing a positive brand story is heightened in today’s economy – there’s not much pocket change to go around.
How do you talk about your brand as a story accurately? It is simple: Plan announcements in advance. Anticipate objections. Alert potential allies. Prepare talking points. Have experts on hand when you make an announcement.
Above all, adopt a communication strategy that demonstrates confidence in the natural power of truth. Recognize that your communication strategy should not be a matter of spin control or massaging of the facts – but as a purpose of your brand.
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