Commercial, marketing and sales best practices

Media strategy best practices

2005-10-29T01:56:00.000-07:00

Compose is a new software tool to measure how consumers are impacted by advertising messages in a broad array of communications channels that go well beyond traditional media like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, including things like search, word-of-mount, public relations and the personal recommendations of friends, families, colleagues and even doctors. What it shows is that many non-traditional media platforms have far more impact with consumers than the traditional ad-supported media, insights which Compose's developers believe could lead to profound shifts in media spending over time.
In fact, such personal experiences as "recommendations by friends/family," product sampling, coupons/promotions, professional recommendations, and examining products in stores, have significantly greater impact than any conventional media buys. The most powerful communications medium overall, according to the study, is print--albeit editorial content, not advertising. "Print articles" were deemed the most persuasive media channel, suggesting a bigger role for public relations in the future.
Television advertising ranks next, followed by in-store advertising, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, company Web sites, online search, radio advertising and free customer magazines. Such traditional media as radio, outdoor, direct mail, cinema, branded Internet advertising, and transit ads ranked far lower in the study.

Best tips on blog marketing

2005-10-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

http://marketing.buzzoodle.com/web_traffic_blog.html
Rules to follow if you want to attract traffic.

New experience marketing - make it real

2005-10-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

A new breed of product placement in the real world, integrating your goods and services into daily life in a targeted, relevant way, so that consumers can make up their minds based on their experience, not your messages.
Sony this summer launched its new range of DVD handy-cams, teaming up with London Zoo for 11 days in June to offer consumers the chance to borrow DVD handy-cams for one hour, free of charge. After a two minute demonstration, families were free to roam the zoo and record all their favourite family moments. After their visit, the DVD handy-cam obviously had to be returned, but participants could keep their DVD (with pre-recorded product & purchase details).
Says Sony: "We had an amazingly successful time at the zoo. Around 95% of visitors who trialled the DVD handy-cam said that they had never seen or heard of any promotional activity quite like this; they were astonished that we were actually going to lend them a handy-cam totally free of charge".

How to make an impact when you are the new Vp of marketing

2005-10-06T22:50:00.000-07:00

8 rules for creating great print ads

2005-09-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

1. Combine product with emotional values
A lot of print ads are just bland and talk about the product. There is not much for the consumer to entertain them. This of course depends on the product category. But creating an emotional reaction will imprint the brand better in the consumers mind.
2. Balance branding with your objectives
The small branding in these ads are ok given the high visual impact and the fact that they communicate well established brands. These create more brand intimacy by engaging consumers to figure these out. Look at your awareness levels. If they are already high, you can focus on other drivers. If they are low, make sure your brand recognition score after viewing the ad for 2sec is high.
3. Create visual puzzles or visual stories
These create more brand intimacy by engaging consumers to figure these out.

Axe: if the nun smells Axe on a guy she would not be able to control herself and therefore putting herself in an undesirable position

Unilever Slim Fast (Germany). If you eat enough of the stuff you can get so slim that you can slide through the bars.
4. Limit your text
Make use of catching headlines. The amount of text should in principle be short, but for some categories like cars people like to read about the stuff. Sometimes consumers just think that with lots of text there is lots to say and therefore deduct better quality from this without actually reading the ad.
5. Steal from the art world
There is a lot to learn from the art world. You can use this to increase your creativity. Copy says: As soon as a black spot appears, use Clearasil.

6. Use strong headlines
Your headlines should motivate readers to want to read on to learn more about your product, price and offer. Get ideas about what headlines to use by scanning different types of ad copy, particularly those from the competition. Effective headlines address a pressing customer need or desire. You should stay away from using your company name as a headline, a common mistake made by many business owners. The reality is that people care more about themselves—and what you can do for them—than your business. You'll get a much higher response rate when your headline quickly answers the question, "What's in it for me?" So, craft a headline that gives your audience a compelling answer.
7. Include phone numbers and websites
Although the creative folks don't like this as it ruins the art in it, a lot of people tear out stuff if they want to follow-up on something. Not including your website is just a waste of an opportunity and these days we see enough evidence that multi media channel advertising is more effective then the sum of the individual media channels.
8. Ensure your message is in line with your brand positioning
When your print ad is in line with your brand positioning, you can easily execute a different campaign from you TV creative. It doen't always have to be synchronic. Your print might want to tackle some of the (product) performance elements that would not be suitable for other media.

Creative outdoor executions

2005-09-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

The bubble gum bursting effect, from India. I like it when the creative extends itself from the billboard into reality.

This walkman is built into the bus shelter and it plays videos. From London.

On average consumers spend 15min waiting for the bus and are bored with nothing to do. You need to entertain them with product info or inspirational media content.

What is your packaging strategy?

2005-09-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

Packaging is the immediate expression of the brand. Therefore it needs to be in line with 5 critical factors.

It's all about gaining share

2005-09-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Do you measure all the relevant share parameters?
Are your sales and marketing teams bonused on these?
Do you know which of the share measures are correlating the best with your profit contribution?

Behind each of these buckets is a wealth of thinking and concepts for both marketing and sales in an integrated way.

How to ensure smooth sales execution with clear priorities

2005-09-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Often, sales teams are bombarded with projects or mini assignments from different departments. Unless there is a clear filter and a written priority list, the sales team will be pulled in different direction, wasting time on non priority projects.
There are easy filter and priority tools available to avoid this pitfall.

Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

2005-06-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

I have found with the right training sales people should become a natural source of first hand consumer insights. They need to look at two elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- interpreting formal consumer performance data

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is ofcourse the biggest and easiest are to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weakly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Interpreting formal consumer performance data
I found that this element is underutilized. Firstly there is not a natural tendency to consider these infos. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
What also helps is translating the insights into channel meaning. So linking consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers. Also there needs to be a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.

Marketing Humor

2005-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

If you work in marketing you might find this funny:

I guess the day starts with the alarm of an old casio ...

Links for free marketing info

2005-01-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/
A good source for innovative digital content. A blog on blogger as well.

http://www.beerbytes.com/
Very comprehensive marketing blog about the liquor industry

http://www.adverblog.com/
Large blog on different marketing topics, mostly concentrated on new media

http://www.bpubs.com/Marketing_and_Sales/Branding/
some interesting articles, not that frequently updated

http://www.brandrepublic.com/home/
UK based marketing info

http://www.warc.com/
World advertising research center. You need to be a member, but the content is top notch.

http://www.marketingprofs.com/Quiz/quizindex.asp
Everyone thinks they're a whiz at marketing, so take this marketing quiz.

Aligning marketing and sales

2004-12-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

Aligning two disciplines that are lead by different leaders is a real challenge. Often, the marketing team does not find it necessary to involve sales and vice versa.

Recently, I organized a major debrief of some key consumer insights to a local marketing team. I requested that the sales management need to be present as well. Both teams enjoyed the deeper insights and gained further understanding. Later the General Manager commented that he did not see the purpose of why sales needed to be there. Well, if you are a company selling consumer goods (and this was the case) then it is for me an easy win to give sales the access to the reasons why consumers buy or feel a certain way about their products. I think they are clever enough to translate the right meaning to their customers.

Here are some tips that might help you:

1. How often does the senior marketing and sales leaders come together to discuss how to improve the commercial approach?
- Often these two teams come oficially together for the annual planning session. Here a sequencial approach works well. First 2-day session is an information exchange where both disciplines provide their pov on opportunities to capture for next year and assessment of performance with key learnings of previous year.

- In addition team members of both parties should be part of ad-hoc meetings. This should become a structured approach, where it is clear to all parties when they should be part of each others activities.

Herewith some thinking on marketing and sales departmental meetings.
Invite key sales reps into marketing brainstorming sessions and/or department meetings. Ask them what’s going on up on the frontline, and what they need from marketing to help develop, maintain, and close business opportunities. Let the marketing department show current project ideas, and get direct feedback.
In return, the sales department should open its meetings to marketing so that this group hears about the day-to-day experiences, what customers expect, and how the products and services are performing. This information will be used to develop campaign concepts and messages, as well as call-to-action strategies. It can also ensure that all potential markets are being reached and addressed with appropriate messages.

Line extending brands

2004-12-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

What is important to consumers when line-extending a brand?

The first thing to do when considering to launch a brand extension is to evaluate how your current brand portfolio is satisfying the identified need? Before jumping to the decision to line-extend, maybe you can stretch an existing brand or license a brand.

When you indeed move forward with brand extension you need to evaluate the brand extension fit. There are four underlying constructs which consumer’s evaluate individually, to formulate an overall judgement as to whether or not the brand extension fits with the core brand.

Relevance:

is the extent to which the core brand attributes are relevant or important to the brand extension category. For example; (1) the core brand attributes of Starbucks are clearly relevant to the sale of coffee grinders, but not relevant to the sale of other kitchen equipment such as microwaves or fridges, (2) the core brand attributes of Coca-Cola are relevant to the sale of other soft drinks and sodas but not the sale of fruit juice such as orange juice.

Recognition:

is the extent to which consumers understand the reasoning behind why the brand is conducting the brand extension as well as the logic of the brand extension. For example; (1) the core brand attributes of McDonalds make it easy to understand / logical in the eyes of consumers for McDonald’s to extend its brand into another restaurant concept, however not easy to understand / logical the eyes of consumers for McDonalds to open a chain of grocery stores, (2) the core brand attributes of Nike make it easy to understand / logical in the eyes of consumers for Nike to extend its brand to sell golfing clothing, but not easy to understand / logical in the eyes of consumers for Nike to sell highly fashionable clothing.

Credibility:

is the extent to which the core brand has attributes which are credible and acceptable to conduct and sell the brand extension. For example; (1) the core brand attributes of Sony make it credible and acceptable for Sony to extend the Sony brand into laptops and digital cameras however they are not credible and acceptable to extend the Sony brand into sports clothing, (2) the core attributes of Budweiser make it credible and acceptable for Budweiser to extend the Budweiser into new beers however they are not credible or acceptable to extend the Budweiser brand into wine or spirits.

Transfer:

is the perceived ability of a brand to transfer their skills and experience to the brand extension. For example, (1) the skills and experience of British Airways are transferable into other areas of air transportation such as domestic flights and low cost flights, however British Airways’ skills and experience are not transferable into coach transportation, (2) the skills and experience of American Express are transferable into travel insurance and foreign exchange services, but not transferable into car rental.

The most crucial component of consumers' brand extension fit judgements is the relevance construct. However all the constructs are important and consumers must perceive all constructs to some degree to perceive a brand extension to fit.

Introduction

2004-12-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

I am a senior marketeer who has spent 10 years in marketing and sales roles (and managing a range of local and international brands) and would like to share my views with other colleagues from the web. The views on this page are my personal views and have nothing to do with the views of my company (a top 100 FMCG).

Muli-cultural marketing
I find that having spend working time in many different countries, the local working experience is highly dependable on the organizational capabilities and local access to seminars and organizations. There is a huge difference in terminology that makes it very confusing for international marketeers to connect with local marketing or sales directors.

Objective Blog
This is my first trial at keeping a blog. I want to see how many people will read it. I will publish mostly my own view but they may be based on foundations from other people.