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Normally I’m not a fan of ad agencies’ self-congratulatory self-promo pieces, but this one is pretty good.  I suppose it helps that the concept itself is one of the more creative ideas I’ve seen in a while.

You need to be able to explain your advantage in 10 seconds or less

Here is a conversation I had with a potential new client a few weeks ago:

ME:  “Okay,  I understand what it is you do and sell, and you’ve told me a little about your sales goals and that you have an aggressive growth strategy for the next 18 months.  But I can think of a few players in your space who seem to be doing similar things.  Can you tell me how you’re different or better?”

CLIENT:  “What do you mean?”

ME:  “I mean, if a potential customer is trying to decide between buying your product and buying that of a competitor, what factors will make them choose you?  Are you cheaper, faster, more reliable…?”

CLIENT:  “Well, we deliver a quality product.”

ME:  “Yes, but what does that mean to you?  What will that mean to the customer?”

CLIENT:  “Hhmmm…I’m not sure.”

ME:  “Well, how are you getting clients right now?”

CLIENT: “Most of our business comes from referrals from our existing clients, actually.”

ME:  “That’s a good sign – it means you’re doing something right.  Why are people referring their friends and colleagues to you?  Are they telling you why they’re calling you?”

CLIENT:  “They say that we’re more trustworthy than other companies in our space, and that we have better customer service, and that we do a better job of solving their problems, and we become a better long-term partner.  Oh, and we always save them a lot of money over the long-term, because we don’t sell them stuff they don’t need.”

Aha!

Marketing is really all about communicating key differentiators

I knew this business had something going for it, because I happened to know that it had done pretty well in the preceding 2 years, even without doing any marketing.  So clearly it was delivering a decent product.  But getting them to articulate their key differentiators – service, strategic partnership, cost-effectiveness – was like pulling teeth.

This is a common problem for small businesses, especially those in the ‘professional services’ category.  They’ve had initial success as a result of personal relationships – typically those of the founder – but after a couple of years, those relationships are saturated.  They know they need to broaden their target market, but when it comes time to explain why they’re different, and better, than their competitors, they find themselves  tongue-tied or reliant on 35-page PowerPoint decks.  Either way they lose the 10 seconds they’ve got to make a big impression with a potential new client.

Here’s the thing:  If people could do what you do, they wouldn’t be in the market for your services in the first place.  In other words, they probably don’t know a whole lot about your industry or field.  So you have to make it easy for them to understand the benefits you’re offering before you try to explain all the details to them.  

That’s where the key differentiators come in.  It’s all about boiling down the ways in which you’re different – and better – to a few key points that you can use any time you’re communicating to a potential client, whether that’s in marketing materials or in person.

Don’t try to squeeze everything in at once

As I wrote the other day, trying to explain every little detail to a customer can backfire – people only have a limited capacity for new information at a given time, and the goal of marketing is to capture their attention long enough to get them sufficiently interested to give you more of their attention.  So rattling off a laundry list of features and benefits isn’t the best strategy.  Instead, pick 2 or 3 and work them into a compelling story. 

Here’s how:

1. Make a list of all the features and benefits of your product or service, and how they’re different from your competitors
2. Choose the top 3 based on what your current customers are telling you mean the most to them 
3. Construct your messaging around these 3 differentiators
4. Test the messaging in the marketplace, and take note of which ones seem to resonate with potential customers
5. Refine as required

Over time, you’ll probably find that different messages work with different target groups:  Your public-sector clients may respond best to cost and security messages, while your private sector clients may respond best to the fact that you deal with other ‘big names’ in their industry.  That’s okay – at least the next time someone asks you how you’re ‘different and better’ than your competitors, you won’t have to say “What do you mean?”

I’m all for a good double-entendre, but…

 

Generally speaking, it takes a lot to get me riled up about ‘sexism’ in advertising, and I’m not easily offended by references to sex:  I had no problems, for example, with that Chapstick ad that got everyone so worked up, and my big problem with those ‘Hail to the V’ ads was that they seemed kind of racist.  (I did draw the line at those rape-referencing Belvedere ads, but they were pretty egregious.)

However. 

I have to say I’m not loving these print ads for these Playtex Fresh + Sexy Wipes.  There are 4 in all:  2 directed at women (peaches and beavers) and two directed at men (knobs and peckers).

Unlike Summer’s Eve and other brands who refer to ‘intimate care’ and ‘freshness’, Playtex Fresh + Sexy wipes are euphemism-free:  Their website tells you, in large friendly letters, that they’re designed to be used before and after sex.  Okay, fine, I guess…it sort of gets me thinking about a Victorian-era prostitute having a quick “whore’s bath” between clients, eking out her days in a Dickensian garret only to die of syphillis before the age of 25, leaving a couple of tragic starving orphans in her wake – but I realize I’m pretty much alone in that little flight of fancy.   And anyway, sometimes I get sick and tired of euphemisms in advertising.  I was well into my teens before I realized that ‘constipation’ referred to bowel movements: All the Correctol laxative ads featured water droplets, so I thought it was for people who couldn’t urinate!

No, I think what’s bothering me about these ads is that it feels like we’ve now crossed the final frontier of stuff to get needlessly insecure about. We’re already paranoid that we won’t attract sexual partners due to our dandruff, our flyaway hair, our incipient wrinkles, our untanned and jiggly bodies, our bad breath and yellowing teeth, our unmanicured nails and our rough, dry elbow skin.  Now, having passed all those tests and successfully lured someone home with us, we have to worry that everything will fall apart once they get a whiff of our genitalia.  And it’s the quantity issue that’s particularly galling:  These wipes aren’t going to give us better sex, just more of it.

So my issue here isn’t actually with sexism (the ads are good at making both sexes feel bad about themselves), or even with the use of words like ‘pecker’ or ‘beaver’.  No, I think the real problem is that these ads seem to imply that words like ‘pecker’ and ‘beaver’ automatically render them amusing and ‘edgy’, when in fact they just make the reader feel kind of depressed about how everyone else seems to be hooking up all the time while they haven’t had a sleepover date in months.  

I’m well aware that I’m not the target here.  No doubt the target market is urban singles, 18-34, whereas I’m a 40-something married person who happens to be 8.5 months pregnant as I write this.  And when you’re launching a new product, a little shock value (“OMG, they used ‘beaver’ in an ad!”) is a good way to get some quick brand awareness. But I can’t help thinking that if you’re going to position your product as a sex aid, maybe you’d do better to make it just a little more aspirational.

 

Did you even look at that data afterwards?

  

In my 15 years in marketing, I’ve seen a lot of focus groups.  I’ve had to recruit for them, write briefs for them, conduct them, spend hours watching them, and, not infrequently, try to prevent the client from getting drunk while watching them.  (If you’ve ever been behind the one-way glass yourself, you know that by the last focus group at 8pm, it’s a miracle if the whole panel isn’t totally loaded through sheer boredom.)

Here is what I’ve learned:

• 99% of the time, focus groups are a waste of money

Oh, I know – you’re thinking I’m a Luddite, or I just didn’t do them right, or I didn’t ask the right questions, or something.

Here’s why I know I’m right:

• In all my years – as a junior ad agency type who had no control over the process or outcome, and as a senior advertising type who supposedly ran the whole thing – I have never seen a focus group overturn whatever preconceived notions the team had before the whole grisly business
• When a focus group ‘insight’ does get used, it’s in exactly the way it wasn’t supposed to be:  as an anecdotal piece of evidence.  “Remember that woman in the focus group who kept saying that she’d never buy cereal in a red box?  That’s why we definitely have to repackage.”
• I have never met a roomful of people more judgemental and dismissive than a bunch of agency types and their client watching a group of people who aren’t like them
• There’s nothing you can learn from $50,000 worth of focus groups that you couldn’t learn by just going out on the street and asking a variety of people what they think of your product.

 

The act of observing changes the observed

In the real world, people who don’t work in marketing don’t think about your marketing concept or your packaging or your Big Idea for more than 5 seconds at a time, and they definitely don’t spend much time analyzing their ‘feelings’ about what they buy.  

Asking them to read a couple of blurbs about your product, then spending 30 minutes discussing their reactions to those blurbs, may give you insight into their reading comprehension and imagination, but it won’t get you even close to an objective assessment of the potential success of your concept.  

(Want proof?  Show a roomful of people a written explanation of 3 concepts, and ask for their thoughts.  Then show them the advertisements that resulted from those concepts and ask them again.  I promise you that their responses won’t be remotely the same.)

The one benefit of focus groups

With only minor exceptions, people who work in marketing are shockingly homogeneous.  We dress the same, listen to the same music, have the same worldviews, and are united in our tacit assumption that anyone who doesn’t work in advertising is significantly less cool (and successful) than we are.  We tend to forget that our purchasing decisions aren’t, in fact, indicative of the rest of the world’s.

Focus groups are a handy reminder that, in fact, there are all kinds of different people out there.  You know, people who manage to get through the day without loving sushi, knowing who Seth Godin is, or wondering when Tindersticks is going to put out a new album.  And while focus groups aren’t going to give you that Killer Insight that will totally transform the way you advertise your product, they may just remind you that the people buying most of that product don’t look (or act) like you.

 

 

…you’re not the target but you watch it twice anyway.

Loved this from DollarShaveClub.com: