Success Through Excess

Jon Sobel writes:

"Over the top" is a phrase heard most often in theatrical circles. But marketing campaigns often go over the top too. And why not? Marketing is a kind of performance, after all, and in performance going over the top isn't always a bad thing. An exaggerated turn in an otherwise tasteful or modest production may be off-putting and unlikable. But where appropriate, it's amusing and effective. Drag queens delight audiences by exaggerating the iconic traits of legendary performers of the past. Heavy metal and rock bands, from Kiss to Twisted Sister to Gwar, make excess and kitsch their stock in trade. By good-humoredly "offending" what's commonly considered to be good taste, they have a pleasing and memorable effect.

Call it the joy of being manipulated. When you're pulling people's strings in such an obvious way that they feel like they're in on the joke, you've made a connection, whether you're channeling Barbra Streisand or selling lottery tickets. The New York State Lottery has a commercial out now that features cute bunnies dressed in adorable little outfits on miniature candy-colored amusement park rides, accompanied by a fluffy-sweet little song. Every time the commercial comes on my wife drops whatever she's doing and stares at the screen like an idiot. It's a marvelous example of success through excess:



Finnish heavy metal band Lordi won a Eurovision contest through excess. True, they had a catchy song too – but videos like this haven't hurt them at all:



Finally, American TV watchers are all too familiar with Pizza Hut's penchant for finding ever more creative ways to do excessive things with pizza dough. The chain's interest in baking things right into the crust got silly enough that it became fodder for a Mad TV parody:



Of course, a memorable marketing campaign doesn't guarantee a big sales boost. The flip side of feeling like you're in on a joke is feeling smart enough not to be seriously manipulated. Having a good product remains key. Further, a commercial's very inventiveness can outshine the product it's meant to promote, especially if the product isn't that remarkable. But all things being equal, the old adage rings true: there's no such thing as bad publicity. And going over the top can be a great way to be so bad you're good.

Bios and Press Releases

Elisa Peimer writes:

While creating both a bio and a press
release for a client recently, I was asked, "Why do I need both?" Good question! If a press release is about something a person is doing or has accomplished, isn't biographical information going to be part of the press release?

Sure. But while a bio and a press release share some information, their purposes are different.

A bio – or biography – tells the whole story of the person it's about. A bio of an executive, author, or musician, for example, talks about that person's background, influences, and career path. It discusses their early work, and what they did in order to create their newest work. It touches upon the choices they made in their lives that led them to where they currently are. It also goes into depth about their current creation – their thoughts about it, what they're trying to accomplish, what they hope their company, customers, or public will get out of it.

In writing a bio, I'll always (if possible) interview the subject to get a sense of what they're about. I'll ask them about their childhood and their early influences, as well as specifics about their newest project – what inspired them, who they worked with, what they hope to achieve. The ultimate goal of the bio is to draw readers in and get them interested in the subject. It's ultimately a marketing piece, something to give the reader a reason to want to find out more about the subject and his or her work.

A press release, on the other hand, is built around a specific piece of news – a product release or event, for example. It pulls information from the bio, such as general background about the person or people involved. The main purpose, however, is to promote a thing – a merger or acquisition, a new deal, a record release party, a new book or CD, a new strategic partnership. The press release is sent out to the media for the purpose of advertising the event. Sometimes publications reprint the press release as is, and sometimes the press release is the instigation for further editorial coverage of the event. A press release should have all the relevant information clearly on the page: what, where, when, who. It should also provide web addresses for where to buy the product, where to RSVP for the event, etc. And it shouldn't be too long – one page is usually best. Publications have limited room to reprint content, and you don't want to give them something they can't fit in their available space.

As you can see, a press release is time-sensitive, while a bio is not. A press release is created to promote something, gets sent out, and that's it. When a new event or piece of news is in the works, a new press release should be written and distributed. A bio, while it can and should be updated over time, is a perpetual tool that should be posted on the subject's website, and on social networking sites and e-commerce sites, as an additional tool for the press. Both are necessary parts of a good marketing and press plan.

Twitter: The New Customer Service

Elisa Peimer writes:

A few months ago I wrote about Twitter as a means of business-to-customer communication. I had been intrigued by reading about what happened to a guy who had been stranded at the airport after his JetBlue flight was delayed. I found it really interesting that the whole customer service process – JetBlue trying to figure out what the problem was, Southwest stepping in and trying to get the guy on one of their flights – represented a fundamentally new way of business-to-customer communication. All instantaneous, all public. It broadened the perception that Twitter was about more than just letting people know what you were doing at any given moment.

One of my favorite bloggers, Dooce.com, recently posted her own highly entertaining story of a customer service issue resolved via Twitter with Maytag. After a long bout of poor customer service regarding a broken washing machine, she tweeted her frustration in no uncertain terms. The result? A call from a manager at Whirlpool, Maytag's parent company; quick service; and even an offer of a free machine from another manufacturer.

I recently had one of my own customer relations issue resolved via Twitter. It happened after a certain amount of frustration. I’m currently working with a wonderful Indian singer named Chandrika Tandon and I was in the process of getting her new album up on popular online music distributor CD Baby. Due to a misunderstanding at the printer, I needed a UPC number from CD Baby, stat. I emailed. No response. I called. No one picked up the phone. I continued to email and call for days, to no avail. Meanwhile, the printer was waiting on the project until a UPC number could be procured. In desperation, I posted a tweet to CD Baby’s Twitter page – Hello? Is anybody out there? Why aren’t you responding to emails or picking up your phone?

Apparently, someone at the company watches their Twitter feed – within 5 minutes I got a response. “Sorry you’ve been having trouble getting through – what’s up?” After going back and forth on Twitter a few times, my UPC code problem was resolved within hours. I was glad I was able to get my client what she needed, but I couldn’t help but be annoyed that I had had to resort to a public calling out of bad customer service before I could get a response. At the same time, thank goodness for Twitter – if I hadn’t had the option of using that method to get in touch with the company, who knows when I would have been able to get the help I needed?

Marketing: A Matter of Life and Death?

Marketing goes far beyond selling shoes and filling theater seats. It dramatically affects people's lives and livelihoods, even alters the directions of nations. "Army Strong," anyone? How about "USO: Until Every One Comes Home"? Harry and Louise? Slogans and characters like these are parts of marketing campaigns for intangibles like services, charities, and political opinions. They want something from you, but in these cases it's often not money; it's your opinion, your vote, your actions, or your time.

The same principles apply in the political world as in the commercial: you have to make what you're selling visible and appealing to enough "consumers" that they give you what you need to succeed, whether it's profit or votes, cash or cachet. It's not for nothing that we talk about President Obama "selling" his health care plan and the public deciding whether to "buy" it.

Marketing can influence segments of the American public to support or oppose any big societal change. Remember when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security? The idea seemed to align with the nation's capitalist, anti-big-government plurarity. Yet a large majority of the public wouldn't buy it.

But Americans didn't reject that plan purely on its merits. They rejected it, in part, because the President didn't sell it well. The plan was seen as threatening an entitlement to which the public had become accustomed. Only a very stong, sharp marketing plan could have made such a change seem wise, or even palatable, and President Bush did not have one.

Now a Democratic President wants to introduce a new public option into the health care system. Ideologically, this move leans in the opposite direction from Bush's Social Security plan. Yet President Obama is having almost as hard a time selling his leftish plan as Bush had with his rightish one. Why? Ineffective marketing on Obama's part, which has left the field open for strong marketing from his opponents.

And their disruptive and provocative tactics are working. In addition to placing emphasis on the Republicans' talking points about deficits, they divert attention away from the issues and towards the political theatrics. The result: polls find more Americans expressing caution and suspicion about health care reform. To counter this, the Democrats must find good marketing strategies of their own: painting the Republicans as do-nothings (a cynical tactic but potentially effective), or suggesting their pockets are being lined by big, private insurance companies.

To do battle, the two sides arm themselves with time-honored marketing techniques: appealing to the heart over the head, saturating the media, simplifying the message, and so on. In cases like this, however, the better marketers will earn something other than bigger profits (although drug companies, insurance providers, and the like are certainly stakeholders too). They will earn the power to determine the well-being of the citizenry.

A bit more important than selling shoes, wouldn't you say?

Entrepreneurship: It’s All About a Can-Do Attitude

This week's post is by Elisa Peimer.

Marketing isn't just about positioning your products for maximum positive exposure. It's also about positioning your company to be seen in a positive light. And if you're an entrepreneur of any kind, your company is you.

If you don't believe what you offer is valuable, you can't expect clients and customers to believe it. Yet of all the things I’ve learned about getting your own business in gear and being successful, maintaining this positive attitude is often the most difficult thing, even if it seems the most basic.

A positive attitude means saying and believing that, even in the midst of a recession, with no clients, and being a start-up, you’re going to make your business work. For a glass-half-empty kind of person, adopting that mindset can be a real challenge. But it’s imperative. If you’re going to convince people that your services are valuable, the first person who has to believe it is you.

This really hit home for me recently after speaking to a couple of friends, both of whom have run their own businesses for their entire professional careers. They’re in completely different fields, but they have two things in common. The first is that their companies have had moments of both real success and real challenges. The second is that they never seem to doubt that they can succeed moving forward. What I find admirable about that is that they maintain that positive attitude despite the fact that their businesses have not followed a straight uphill trajectory. It isn't an unbroken string of success that has made them impervious to negative thinking, it's their own internal energy and drive. The fact that sometimes they stumble doesn’t make them doubt their ability to succeed.

Try this simple, refreshing, eye-opening exercise:

Write down all the reasons why someone should hire you.

That's it.

These could include all kinds of different facets of you and your business. Maybe you have many years of experience in your field. Or you’re really good at follow-through. You're good with people. You've got a network of contacts that makes you more valuable. You're a great idea-person. You’re a fantastic proofreader, consultant, financial advisor, writer, designer, developer – whatever it is. You know what your skills are, and where your strengths lie. Make sure you remember those facts. Keep them in mind and use them to feel confident and valuable when you’re looking for business or working with a client.

Of course, that's often easier said than done. But it's essential. As you forge ahead in your business – and in your life – remember that your biggest fan is you. It’s much easier to focus on your failures and shortcomings, and we all have those. But it’s more pleasant – and lucrative – to concentrate on what makes us valuable to our clients, our friends, and ourselves.

Chain Stores and Localvores

Marketing is the language of commerce, and like any language it can be used for good or ill. Sometimes the line is hard to draw.

One of the latest marketing buzzwords to escape the hive is "local-washing," a variant of "green-washing."

Green-washing has been around for a while. It means making false or exaggerated claims that a product is environmentally friendly. Local-washing, then, means asserting (or suggesting) that a product or service is local when in fact it is not — or when using the term "local" is, at the very least, a bit of a stretch.

The new marketing technique takes advantage of the growing "localvore" movement, in which consumers favor products (food and other things) that come from their own region. The growing popularity of farmers' markets, business alliances like Indiebound (for independent booksellers), and region-based movements such as Local First Vermont are a few of the more organized manifestations of the increasingly popular "local first" way of thinking.

Big corporations are learning to take advantage. Wal-Mart stores, where an increasingly large number of Americans do their grocery shopping, now feature local produce sections. But according to Stacy Mitchell of the New Rules Project, "[t]he chain's] local-food offerings are usually limited to a few of the main commodity crops of the state in question...Yet this modest gesture has won Wal-Mart glowing coverage in numerous daily newspapers. Few ask...[whether this actually creates] more and better opportunities for local farmers than the grocers [Wal-Mart] replaces...Wal-Mart, like other chains, has learned that tossing around the word 'local' is a relatively inexpensive way to convey civic virtue."

Starbucks is rebranding some of its stores, removing their corporate identity entirely in order to disguise them as independent shops. Barnes & Noble encourages store employees to create video blogs about their favorite books as part of an effort to make individual stores "feel" more local. Supermarket chain Winn-Dixie touts "local flavor since 1956." HSBC, the huge international financial institution, calls itself "the world's local bank."

These techniques can seem disingenuous, even outright fraudulent. On the other hand, it's hard to blame the chains for availing themselves of whatever cultural developments are attracting consumers. They didn't get to be big corporations by being inherently evil, they did so by outcompeting in the marketplace. Now, suffering something of a backlash, they are casting about for ways to maintain their dominance.

Can big chains fool enough of the public enough of the time to make their local-washing campaigns succeed? Can we accept a certain level of exaggeration as a natural manifestation of market forces at work? Or is any degree of local-washing unacceptable deception?

Is more regulation needed? Vermont has strict rules about when a product can be labeled with the state's name. New York City's Greenmarkets permit only produce grown on farms within a specific mileage range of the city.

What do you think?

Meanwhile, stay tuned. No one knows how all this will shake out.  See you at the Greenmarket!

Merchandising: Capitalizing on the Surprising

In our office we have a coffee mug with the picture, name, and slogan of a singer-songwriter we knew years ago. She left the business awhile back, but if she ever turns up in our orbit again, it's fair to say that the presence of that mug will have some effect on the interest we'll take.

I thought of this when I learned of a high-class twist on the time-tested concept of the promotional mug. In conjunction with the release of Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, Los Abrazos Rotos, the illy coffee company has created an arty cup-and-saucer collection featuring emblematic scenes from the director's most famous movies.

Now, much as I adore Penélope Cruz, I'm not about to spend $60 for the privilege of sipping espresso from a cup with her face on it. But that's not the point. Just the fact that I've learned about this promotion (via a Twitter post) has incrementally increased the likelihood that I'll see the film.

Why? Because the film's promoters did something just a little bit new, a little bit different, and hence a little bit worth tweeting about.

When I saw Rock of Ages on Broadway a couple of months ago, every audience member was handed an LED "cigarette lighter" to wave during the show's classic hair-band songs. It was a great promotional gimmick, because the darn thing's actually useful as a small flashlight, so I've held on to it. Although I loved Rock of Ages, I'm sure that tiny piece of swag has increased the number of people I've recommended the show to, because carrying the little light around in my bag has kept the musical closer to top-of-mind.

Merchandising—whether it's swag (free stuff) or purchasable items (original cast albums, concert t-shirts, an Almodóvar espresso cup)—is here to stay, because it works. But coming up with something creative, something a little different from what people are used to—something, in other words, worth talking about—can give a campaign that extra nudge and push the product deeper into public awareness.

It doesn't even have to be expensive.  For the right price, you can get a logo imprinted on just about any manufactured item you can think of, but the do-it-yourself method works too: I've seen musicians selling, along with their CDs and t-shirts, unique items such as art prints, self-printed books of poetry, homemade cosmetics, and logo-imprinted candy.  Some of these items are more lasting than others, of course, but the creative thinking is evident.  Singer-songwriter Kay Ashley hands out "Kay-zoos" at her shows—bright yellow kazoos emblazoned with her logo.  During her set, she has you play along with a particular song, and when you go home you have a lasting (and possibly useful) souvenir.

So it's not necessarily about spending a lot of money.  It's creative thinking that can give your product a push into the public's consciousness. Go and create.