Arthurs Marketing Coup.
Celebrating 250 years of brewing Guinness from Dublin, Diageo garnered the ultimate marketing coup yesterday. Gigs, toasts to “Martha”, leader advertising and various “events” marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of a 9,000 year lease by the man himself using one hundred quid that he got as a legacy from his Godfather. Mario Puzo himself couldn’t have dreamed up the dynasty that arose from those beginnings. It’s notable that he switched to brewing porter in subsequent years rather than the original Ale which he had started manufacturing in Leixlip in 1750. Otherwise we could all be toasting the anniversary with a pint of Smithwicks – perish the thought!
Anyway, the brilliance that is Guinness marketing down the years continues – and hats off to the current team who have almost certainly engineered the biggest marketing cut through of the current year.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The Triumph of Product over Message
The battle for customers in the mobile telecoms market continues to consume vast amounts of marketing €. Vodafone is pumping millions into its “Mission Red” ATL and “With Compliments” BTL campaigns while Meteor has recently launched “nocatch.ie” which looks like it will gobble up market share for them. No doubt these campaigns have deep customer insights, expert market segmentation and brilliantly executed communications program at their core. But who’s winning?
Well, after 15 years of loyalty I’ve just moved from Vodafone to O2. Why? The iPhone. Plain and simple, this device is the most advanced yet easy to use mobile phone ever. End of story. And having moved to O2, I now find that the network coverage is better, the customer service experience superior and the web site easier to navigate. I can’t say how good these things are with Meteor – they don’t have the iPhone either so I didn’t consider them. And I’m spending about €20 more per month on my mobile bills than I did before. But I don’t mind, because I love the iPhone and I’m happy to spend that €20 just to have it. I was in a Car Phone Warehouse store recently and the manager told me there are fights breaking out at some stores when iPhone stocks become available, such is the demand. This for a product that was launched in June. Apple made 1 million of them for the launch and apparently could have sold 6 million.
So, no matter how good your marketing is you’ve got to start with inspiring products and a great service proposition to back them up. Simple eh? One would have thought so – but nothing in this world is that easy as everybody knows...
Well, after 15 years of loyalty I’ve just moved from Vodafone to O2. Why? The iPhone. Plain and simple, this device is the most advanced yet easy to use mobile phone ever. End of story. And having moved to O2, I now find that the network coverage is better, the customer service experience superior and the web site easier to navigate. I can’t say how good these things are with Meteor – they don’t have the iPhone either so I didn’t consider them. And I’m spending about €20 more per month on my mobile bills than I did before. But I don’t mind, because I love the iPhone and I’m happy to spend that €20 just to have it. I was in a Car Phone Warehouse store recently and the manager told me there are fights breaking out at some stores when iPhone stocks become available, such is the demand. This for a product that was launched in June. Apple made 1 million of them for the launch and apparently could have sold 6 million.
So, no matter how good your marketing is you’ve got to start with inspiring products and a great service proposition to back them up. Simple eh? One would have thought so – but nothing in this world is that easy as everybody knows...
Friday, August 28, 2009
Hard-hitting creative that gets the point across
Directory is always a great resource site for investigating the best in direct marketing across the world. This quarter, the following campaign for a homeless charity in Sweden stands out for using direct mail in an innovative way.
Christmas is always a time when charities are in fierce competition for share of mind and donations. The mailing succeeds by evoking the end recipient’s senses, forcing them to imagine the experience of being out in the wet and the cold, just like the mailing (and ultimately a homeless person). The end result is simple but hard-hitting creative.
http://directnewideas.com/index.php/2009/07/09/the-homeless-letter?sw=
Christmas is always a time when charities are in fierce competition for share of mind and donations. The mailing succeeds by evoking the end recipient’s senses, forcing them to imagine the experience of being out in the wet and the cold, just like the mailing (and ultimately a homeless person). The end result is simple but hard-hitting creative.
http://directnewideas.com/index.php/2009/07/09/the-homeless-letter?sw=
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Email Marketing – One of the most cost effective communication channels
Having a good email database and knowing what you can do with it can greatly increase your bottom line and may be one of the cheapest marketing channels you can use, when you know how to do this effectively.
One of the most cost effecive mediums to use with a good ecrm is a email marketing campaign, if you work with a good email platform provider. The objective of this type of campaign can be two-fold, one to acquire new email addresses or two, cross-sell or retain your existing customer base.
Squeeze, from the Batchelors beverage company recent email campaign achieved response rate results of up to 60%. The main objective of this campaign was to obtain email addresses to use for future Ecrm marketing campaigns. An incentive of a holiday was incorporated in this promotion.
An offer or competition can increase the response rate dramatically. You have only a few seconds to hold your audiences attention before they press delete.
Simple ways to start building your base:
1) Direct Mail:
With any DM campaign you are sending to your existing or potential customer base, provide a competition or reason for your customers to release their email addresses to you.
2. Telemarketing:
Get someone inhouse to call around your existing base, or potential leads to obtain their email addresses
3 A url link to sign up to your website for newsletters or discounts should be placed on all collateral and advertising pieces. Competitions are always successful ways to easily obtain these addresses.
Gaining your customers email addresses will:
• Provides a cost effective channel to speak directly to your customers
• Can work successfully along DM campaigns to increase recall and awareness
• Increases the ROI of your markeing investments
• Tracking mechanisms can allow you to evaluate this campaign the minute the email is sent
Email Marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing tools when used right, and with the right database.
One of the most cost effecive mediums to use with a good ecrm is a email marketing campaign, if you work with a good email platform provider. The objective of this type of campaign can be two-fold, one to acquire new email addresses or two, cross-sell or retain your existing customer base.
Squeeze, from the Batchelors beverage company recent email campaign achieved response rate results of up to 60%. The main objective of this campaign was to obtain email addresses to use for future Ecrm marketing campaigns. An incentive of a holiday was incorporated in this promotion.
An offer or competition can increase the response rate dramatically. You have only a few seconds to hold your audiences attention before they press delete.
Simple ways to start building your base:
1) Direct Mail:
With any DM campaign you are sending to your existing or potential customer base, provide a competition or reason for your customers to release their email addresses to you.
2. Telemarketing:
Get someone inhouse to call around your existing base, or potential leads to obtain their email addresses
3 A url link to sign up to your website for newsletters or discounts should be placed on all collateral and advertising pieces. Competitions are always successful ways to easily obtain these addresses.
Gaining your customers email addresses will:
• Provides a cost effective channel to speak directly to your customers
• Can work successfully along DM campaigns to increase recall and awareness
• Increases the ROI of your markeing investments
• Tracking mechanisms can allow you to evaluate this campaign the minute the email is sent
Email Marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing tools when used right, and with the right database.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Love is the greatest thing….
You can’t be in this business and not love people: be interested in their motivations, know what creative makes their eyes water, what strategy has resonance with their targets. Relationships with your clients have to be genuine and deep to survive the current climate. Building relationships isn’t always easy, like in any personal relationship you have to be prepared to listen, intuit, and build your interaction step by step. If you demonstrate care with briefs, really put in the extra effort on all levels of client service through the project and give good value for money (whether this is a ‘summer’ discount or a credit on hours not used), this will be remembered by the client. Loyal clients are wonderful, even when they move on from particular roles or leave the company, they will still take your call and you may even win them back as a new client.
You can have all the creative strategy and wonderful insights in the world, but without trust and belief in a client services person, you won’t get repeat business. We have highly educated and seasoned clients now who know what they want and understand the marketing patter extremely well. If the idea is not relevant or authentic, you will have lost them.
For me, you have to fall in love with your client, find something of interest in them as a person, learn their style, meet them on common ground, be there for them - within reason - become indispensable. You need to be the first person they call for a solution. You will have your disagreements and bad days, this is the normal part of any relationship, but you have to aim for the smallest amount of dissonance in the client relationship. Experience will have ironed out the commonly made universal mistakes, excellence in account management should be the goal. Don’t make assumptions. Strong client relationships is an art, for the quick buck merchants in advertising and marketing, this will have been a tough year.
You can have all the creative strategy and wonderful insights in the world, but without trust and belief in a client services person, you won’t get repeat business. We have highly educated and seasoned clients now who know what they want and understand the marketing patter extremely well. If the idea is not relevant or authentic, you will have lost them.
For me, you have to fall in love with your client, find something of interest in them as a person, learn their style, meet them on common ground, be there for them - within reason - become indispensable. You need to be the first person they call for a solution. You will have your disagreements and bad days, this is the normal part of any relationship, but you have to aim for the smallest amount of dissonance in the client relationship. Experience will have ironed out the commonly made universal mistakes, excellence in account management should be the goal. Don’t make assumptions. Strong client relationships is an art, for the quick buck merchants in advertising and marketing, this will have been a tough year.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Radio, The Theatre of the Mind
If you’re going to take the stage in the theatre of the mind you had better be well rehearsed. Why? Because radio is the most easily ignored medium of all. You can be changing a nappy while the radio is on, you can be driving to Kinnegad while the radio is on, you can be jogging while the radio is on. But in all of those cases there is the one, singular, most abiding variable – in a fraction of a second your attention to the radio can be distracted by the nappy-needing baby, by that cyclist overtaking you on the inside, or by that dog snapping at your Nikes.
Radio is the most ubiquitous medium, but because of that it can so often become aural wallpaper, that drone of adds and chirpy DJs that can be tuned out of just as quickly as it can be tuned in to. Which is why, before you go on the airwaves, you’d better decide what you want to say, and more importantly, how you want to say it.
Because how you say it is the means by which you hold attention, and when you hold attention you increase recall, and when you increase recall you increase the likelihood of a response, and when you increase response you increase the likelihood of purchase. And if that latter is a run-on sentence it is only because message-absorption is a run-on cognitive sequence in which the audience carried through a proposition and requested to act upon it. But the first task is always “attention”. Lock the audience in immediately. The second task is “engagement”. Give me something to hook onto. The third task is the “resolution”. It can be either a call to action, a punch-line in a comedic execution, or even a provocative assertion as to the brand/products attributes.
This is a tried and true methodology. It applies to ads that are intended to create simple awareness, it applies to hard-core retail, and it applies to public-service advertising. Attention, engagement, resolution – three acts that always perform well in the theatre of the mind.
Radio is the most ubiquitous medium, but because of that it can so often become aural wallpaper, that drone of adds and chirpy DJs that can be tuned out of just as quickly as it can be tuned in to. Which is why, before you go on the airwaves, you’d better decide what you want to say, and more importantly, how you want to say it.
Because how you say it is the means by which you hold attention, and when you hold attention you increase recall, and when you increase recall you increase the likelihood of a response, and when you increase response you increase the likelihood of purchase. And if that latter is a run-on sentence it is only because message-absorption is a run-on cognitive sequence in which the audience carried through a proposition and requested to act upon it. But the first task is always “attention”. Lock the audience in immediately. The second task is “engagement”. Give me something to hook onto. The third task is the “resolution”. It can be either a call to action, a punch-line in a comedic execution, or even a provocative assertion as to the brand/products attributes.
This is a tried and true methodology. It applies to ads that are intended to create simple awareness, it applies to hard-core retail, and it applies to public-service advertising. Attention, engagement, resolution – three acts that always perform well in the theatre of the mind.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Sweat your best asset – existing customers...
Whether you’ve got 1,000 or 1,000,000 customers these days you need to make best use of the ones you’ve got. Using Direct Marketing to extract value from an existing customer database needs thought, planning, investment and data driven decision making. Here are 10 suggestions to help get you started...
1. Deploy a campaign management system with a reporting module. Find one that integrates with your back office processing system. This will enable you to :-
a. Manage your campaign database
b. Track campaign history right down to customer level
c. Use profiling, propensity modelling and segmentation based campaigns and manage your test and learn program (see below)
d. Stay compliant with Data Protection legislation and
e. Track and report on campaign performance – which you should do at least daily.
By linking your back office enterprise system to your campaign database you can also ensure you have the most up-to-date personal and transactional information about your customers – vital for a ‘segmentation of 1’ which is what all customers want.
2. Cut out wastage (and do your bit for sustainability). Decile your customer database by breaking it into 10 equal size parts in order of response propensity. Use a “test and learn” approach with a robust financial model to find the point at which it becomes unprofitable to mail if the response rate dips below the economic threshold. In most databases this will be around the 3rd decile (in other words, 70% of your mailing is going to people who won’t respond in sufficient quantities to justify your spend investment!)
3. Build life-cycle direct marketing programs. Develop matrix based “next offer product” campaigns for your customers as they move up the value chain – make each offer progressively more compelling if they do not respond (don’t always start with your best value proposition). Over-lay operational contacts on this for an end to end view of contact points – and make sure you are comfortable with the level of contact.
4. Mail each customer no more than once every quarter – a customer database tires when you mail more often than 4 times a year.
5. Protect those you have – the first statistical model you should develop is one for attrition propensity. Improve the value proposition of those likely to go – and do it now, or they will inevitably churn over to your competitors.
6. Test and learn. On every mailing, split the base into “campaign” and “test” databases. When the test beats the campaign, deploy it as the champion. Test creative’s, price, incentive offers – whatever is in your toolkit.
7. Upweight the performance of DM campaigns with other media – a well developed and deployed advertising campaign can deliver a 50% uplift in response rates –provided the creative and targeting are harmonised across all the executions. Use one phone number and track responses based on date, time and “how did you hear about us” questions from your call centre agents. Recall beats ‘nth’ degree tracking anytime. And customers won’t remember 20 numbers that are based on your different marketing media but they will remember one “vanity” number (or web address) consistently promoted.
8. Time your mailings campaigns. DM dropping through the letterbox on a Monday or Tuesday gets a higher response rate than that dropping on a Thursday or Friday. Stay away from Bank Holiday weekends (into or out of them) and slow down the output if the weather picks up.
9. Harmonise your marketing mix internally. Make your staff ambassadors for your brand. They need to believe what you believe to make your customers believe!
10. There’s lots more where this came from. For the best in direct marketing call the best now – DMA on 01-6671144.
1. Deploy a campaign management system with a reporting module. Find one that integrates with your back office processing system. This will enable you to :-
a. Manage your campaign database
b. Track campaign history right down to customer level
c. Use profiling, propensity modelling and segmentation based campaigns and manage your test and learn program (see below)
d. Stay compliant with Data Protection legislation and
e. Track and report on campaign performance – which you should do at least daily.
By linking your back office enterprise system to your campaign database you can also ensure you have the most up-to-date personal and transactional information about your customers – vital for a ‘segmentation of 1’ which is what all customers want.
2. Cut out wastage (and do your bit for sustainability). Decile your customer database by breaking it into 10 equal size parts in order of response propensity. Use a “test and learn” approach with a robust financial model to find the point at which it becomes unprofitable to mail if the response rate dips below the economic threshold. In most databases this will be around the 3rd decile (in other words, 70% of your mailing is going to people who won’t respond in sufficient quantities to justify your spend investment!)
3. Build life-cycle direct marketing programs. Develop matrix based “next offer product” campaigns for your customers as they move up the value chain – make each offer progressively more compelling if they do not respond (don’t always start with your best value proposition). Over-lay operational contacts on this for an end to end view of contact points – and make sure you are comfortable with the level of contact.
4. Mail each customer no more than once every quarter – a customer database tires when you mail more often than 4 times a year.
5. Protect those you have – the first statistical model you should develop is one for attrition propensity. Improve the value proposition of those likely to go – and do it now, or they will inevitably churn over to your competitors.
6. Test and learn. On every mailing, split the base into “campaign” and “test” databases. When the test beats the campaign, deploy it as the champion. Test creative’s, price, incentive offers – whatever is in your toolkit.
7. Upweight the performance of DM campaigns with other media – a well developed and deployed advertising campaign can deliver a 50% uplift in response rates –provided the creative and targeting are harmonised across all the executions. Use one phone number and track responses based on date, time and “how did you hear about us” questions from your call centre agents. Recall beats ‘nth’ degree tracking anytime. And customers won’t remember 20 numbers that are based on your different marketing media but they will remember one “vanity” number (or web address) consistently promoted.
8. Time your mailings campaigns. DM dropping through the letterbox on a Monday or Tuesday gets a higher response rate than that dropping on a Thursday or Friday. Stay away from Bank Holiday weekends (into or out of them) and slow down the output if the weather picks up.
9. Harmonise your marketing mix internally. Make your staff ambassadors for your brand. They need to believe what you believe to make your customers believe!
10. There’s lots more where this came from. For the best in direct marketing call the best now – DMA on 01-6671144.
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