Starship Articles
This is a huge chasm I’m trying to stretch my tiny brain across. The gap between selling to chicks and selling to blokes. The massive variant between how women generally think and how men do.
I neatly side step the issue of ‘You’re a bloke, what the F would you know?’ by engaging in a spot of lunch with eight bright girlies. Instant market research and a nice way to spend the arvo.
They were Jo Donelly, the esteemed editor of this magazine, Charlie Spendlove, marketing manager of GoldCross Cycles (Bunnings of bikes), Gillian Franklin, boss of Heat, distributors of Max factor, Cover Girl etc. Stephanie Gerarthy, from Tolarno Galleries, big players in modern art, Anne Tesch, who’s a PR guru, Deb Ganderton, communications manager of Nillumbik Council, Maree Marshall, who’s an engineer working with government on environment issues, Prue Kirkcaldie, who’s Starship’s creative director and Hayley Jenkins, who is almost finished a marketing degree at Swinburne. Their comments create this article like bomb-blasts make a Bagdad evening.
Back to the issue of ‘What the fuck would men know?’. Not much. According to the panel. And all the research I’ve ever done leads to a conclusion that will disgust almost all men. I’m expecting to be shunned in pubs and taken off the waiting list of clubs I’ll never be asked to join. Men know less about how to sell to women than we collectively know about the back of Pluto’s fourth moon.
Men, as animals who are interested in getting into women’s knickers, instinctively do things that work on some women at some stages (ie. when they are buff and it’s a hot day, they may take their top off to change the tyre if the audience is 20, blonde and slim, or suck in their gut when they are old and fat and walking along the beach past say 3 x 20, blonde and slim, or drive an expensive car when they are short and balding in an attempt to impress any female who’s 20, blonde and slim etc.) Which women find amusing (like you would watching the monkeys in the Zoo trying to attract your attention by picking their bums.) Thank God. Males instinctive behaviour is one reason we are the most successful creature on the planet – we’d have no population at all if you left things to most males’ conscious thought.
On the subject of sex, women buy men like they buy anything. Most of the time they choose from a range of potential suitors and take the one that has the best combination of attributes. Far from being an exciting purchase, it’s often a question of who has the least things wrong with him.
But do men understand women? Do they know what makes them tick? Do they make marketing decisions that will automatically work on the women in their sights? Nup. If they are successful in a project at all, it’s either because they have followed previous steps that have worked, or they just get lucky. Or maybe they have researched women heavily and have just managed to pull out a few correct insights.
Does it matter? As a male, the resounding conclusion is no. We don’t give a hoot. If it works, it works. That’s how men think. It’s like working the shower nozzle or cooking toast. Why get all steamed up about ‘why’ when all men want to know is ‘how’. Men, in the main are not concerned about women’s feelings, their sense of community, their emotional needs. We pay lip service to them, because it gets us laid, but we actually don’t care. Women, on the other hand, do give a rats about other’s feelings. Which is where the great divide really starts to split.
How are women different?
Today’s woman in Oz has a very complex life. Pressures and expectations brought to bear are so far beyond a males’ understanding it’s almost impossible to explain it to men. Women juggle their lives constantly. Why? Because the way the world works now means we both need to make a dollar and only one of us does most of the domestic chores, the ‘household infrastructure’ And it usually isn’t men. “Men can’t do more than one thing at a time”. (Jo)
(Charlie) “Looking after a sick child, got to do this birthday party, the phone was ringing, have to send an email… In the fifties and sixies it was all about being a good wife and a mother. Everything appeared lovely and then came the feminist movement. I am all for equality and independence and free speech, but I think we have got the bum deal. All we’ve done is double our workload. When she’s watching TV and notices something aimed at her, she doesn’t mind the whole “Because I’m worth it!” Because I fucken am! I think that women are complex, in a sense, as they can observe the whole content and package in an ad and then choose or not whether they want to get sucked in”.
Women care, men compare.
Women are much more conscious of the group, inclusion, of feelings, of the collective community and it’s needs. Males are more conscious of their own needs, their ego and their dominance of those around in some way or another. I’ll give you an example. Males playing cricket will look around the field. They’ll say to themselves, he’s taller, but I’m more agile. He’s a more accurate bowler, but I’m a better catch. He’s a faster runner, but I know when to run… It goes on.
Women would look around the field and think, seeing Cathy, looking a bit concerned about something, ‘I wonder how Cathy’s little 4 year old Ruby is getting on with her cold? Perhaps I should tell Cathy about that new chest rub I was reading about.’
What do women matter?
Over the last 25 years I’ve conducted literally thousands of studies on purchase behaviour. Often focus groups, with males in one group, women in another. The differences are staggering. If you’re passing Starship, drop in and I’ll show you some video footage. Be it finance or cars, white goods or stereos, women make almost all major purchases. They get the info, decide what to buy then talk the male into going off and getting it.
And in business they also dominate. The Bureau of Stats found that of the 1,179,300 small businesses operated in Australia, 529,800 (45%) were equally or individually operated by females (June 2003). In addition, females dominated with an annual growth rate of 5.7%, almost five times the growth of male-operated businesses.
A large percentage of Australians work in small businesses. I think it’s 80% of all businesses have less than 5 employees. And I think it’s about 50% of all people work in these small companies. In almost all of those businesses the woman do the paper work, the accounts. They make purchase decisions, They hold the cheque book and decide who gets paid when. Yes, males do make decisions, but even then, it’s often on information gathered by women.
Women spread their power. They share their information with the rest of the peer group. Good or bad, info, like the ebola virus, spreads faster than you can spray. So piss one of them off, and watch your sales tumble across a whole suburb in months.
The balance needs shifting
(Gillian) “Big issue that we face as a country is our economic sustainability. We have a declining fertility rate (1.75) Women who want to work have to make a sacrifice, I don’t think I’ll have children, or I’ll have one child. Because it’s too hard. I’m no longer willing to be the mum at home only, because I don’t get that sense of value and I’ve also had a sniff at what its feels like to have a life and I really like it, so I’m going to continue to pursue that. To market to women, it must be on a more fundamental level, which means changes to culture in companies which allow women to have the best of both.” (ie. Crèches at work places, time off to pick up the kids, or work-from-home during school holidays).
Gillian came to the conclusion that she can’t do all three well at once – “Today I did an average day at work but I was a good mum because I went to rowing at 5am. Tomorrow I can’t do the rowing but I’m going to be a good business women. It’s about compromise and balance. I think women today have the right to make choices, they need better services that support, to allow them to have those options because the majority of women, 60% who have children, work.”
Are women better marketers to women?
Not much, according to the panel.
(Stephanie) “No. Those make-up ads ‘Cause you’re worth it!’, fuck off! Of course you are a women, of course you have a shit life and need a pat on the back. Go buy yourself a lipstick. I’ll go and buy a car if I feel that bad! I think they only put certain images of women on TV. You’re either a sexy young woman, a married house wife with ten kids, or you’re a powerful women in a suit. That’s all marketing to women, one of those three.”
What’s the process?
Women shop. Men buy.
Because women in the main care a lot more about everything, including the issue that’s on the table at the moment, like say what car the family needs, they do the research. They are prepared to spend the time asking questions (because they don’t think of it as an affront to their egos that they might not know something – have you ever seen a man ask directions in a strange town? No. He’d rather look at the map or drive around for 20 minutes in circles.)
Women ask. They note details. They grab the brochures. They take them home and show the family, gauging reaction, feelings.
Men just want features. “It will do that too?” Thinking ,‘Of course, I knew that, BMW invented them in 1937…” while women want factors. ‘How will little Sarah feel about that? Will John’s work mates like it?’
How does this affect you, the marketer?
Use detail
This detailed shopping has profound implications for marketers. Drop the items you think don’t matter much to your targets of your advertising, go shallow on the detail, suffer losses in sales.
Use the right words
Women are hyper-sensitive to wording. It’s worth hiring female copy-writers for this very reason. Males just don’t pick up on the inferences. Or they think women will find their jokes funny, because men do.
(Gillian) “We have done research and women under 20 and women over forty are happy to be called ‘girls’ but if you refer to women in between these ages, they get really offended. ‘Oh, that girl in the office’. They think its quite demeaning, less evolved.”
Be careful how you come across
So many marketers get it wrong, it’s scary. But the best at the complete miss is the car business. A business so male-biased it can only be described as primitive.
(Prue) “I worked at an agency (JWT) for Ford on the Carla Zampatti Laser. Research told them that women were choosing the cars, and had a lot more interest than they thought. I was the girl in the agency, worked on Ford and got ‘put into a corner’ because I was a girl. Told to do ‘stuff that worked for women’. The trouble was that it wasn’t flowing through. The guys that work in the car company were totally chauvinistic. Go to any car company”.
Check your media buy – is it skewed to women?
Women read more widely than the stats would show (I’ve done the media research) and if you’re selling almost anything, women will be the main information source, so bias heavily towards women and you won’t go wrong.
Be innovative in media – women read/source info widely
But be careful where to put your support. When asked what are the key female media outlets, the response was that magazines are the primary media but too many of the magazine publications marketed to females focus on stories that suit their male owners, and/or an appallingly out-dated culture.
(Charlie) ”The material is almost pornographic and the fact an 8 year old can walk into a newsagents’ and pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan and learn about how to give a blow job is frightening.”
Affinity vs. sucking up
Don’t make it patronising or too obvious that you are trying to suck up to women. They are not stupid. (Jo) “I can’t help it, my gender glasses are never off”.
Real vs. perfect
To get respect you need reality, in certain markets. (Obviously not make-up, where the purpose is to make perfection out of something that isn’t.) but where belief or credibility is an issue, show the warts. Especially when you’re choosing spokes-people, be older or younger than perfect. Be fatter or thinner. Have bad teeth.
Form an emotional bond
Women respect emotion and sensitivity more than men. Use it.
Believe in the network
Don’t brag – bond/Don’t bash – group. Design your communications so they work with a peer-group system. That’s short grab-lines that can be passed-on and ads bought on corners of magazines or whole pages, so they can be easily ripped-out and passed on or faxed.
Chaos vs. Control
Women want control in their lives, because their lives are often chaotic. This, like time, is a great promise, under utilized.
Don’t over life-style
Most marketers are missing a huge opportunity when they opt for situational or life-style ads instead of humour-based ads.
(Stephanie) “Marketers make mistakes, women are hard done by, they have to go to work and have terrible lives, let’s be empathetic. Good on you. “You’re worth it!” Just another version of “Good on you mum, Tip Top’s the one!” What they’re trying to do is make them situational based. To market to a women you must put them into a real context. Make it believable”.
Be global in your values, local with your problems
(Gillian) “The Japanese have made global ads very well. We don’t relate to the Japanese,(but) we relate to the quality of Japan and the people are so cool and stylish. They can run those ad’s around the world and people can relate to the brand. There’s a difference between communicating, to people have got empathy for the product, eg. A foundation, or whether the empathy is for the brand.”
Copy is everything
Choose your writers wisely. Go for women’s speak, not perfect grammar. Look at the big selling magazines. They use a language that’s easy to read, sounds like conversation, but almost impossible to find in books or men’s magazines. Who is reflecting reality?
Provide critical information, in women’s speak, on packs, POS.
Make your lists of features longer, your benefits more to her way of thinking. Given the attention to detail most women possess, the more information you can provide to satisfy her purchase, the better.
Make it a sound bite
A sound bite can be said by a social creature (in a rush) to the next person she is speaking with.
Make it funny
Women need humour to survive in a man’s world. They are past masters at it. They appreciate it more and respond well to it. The panel listed a stack of funny ads.
(Gillian) “Banana Boat UV sunscreen ad had black guys putting it on the bottom of their feet, sending up the whitey’s. When the brand was bought over from Colgate, it was stipulated that they had to agree to never run that ad again, because it was offensive to black people. Everybody in the world found this ad very humorous. The (official) reason it got pulled was that ‘you don’t put sun-screen under your feet’. How stupid do they think we are? They think that we are so dumb that we can’t see the joke.”
Track results
And massage tactics, women are open to improvements and innovation more than men.
Lots of missed opportunities
Let’s consider your industry, in the light of the following comments about one ‘male’ market, beer.
(Anne) “Beer companies have ever only marketed to men, up until now with some of the new trendier ones. Some years ago they did a low cal beer and they thought this was a really terrific idea, but how do they actually sell it to the blokes? Because the blokes want real beer. So they had three go’s. First was the really abstract one that no one understood what it was? the beer? the clothes he was wearing? or his shoes? Then they did another one, at a great expense to a sumo wrestler “Me no thin beer, me a sumo wrestler”. Then the third one. The problem was they couldn’t bring themselves to say in the ad, “This will quench your thirst and it’s less calories. Isn’t that terrific?”. They couldn’t bring themselves to sell it to girls. They could have done a great ad that would be, “A beer without the belly”.
In summary
Like the bloke selling the car to Gillian, who called her ‘love’ and directed his spiel to her male partner, most marketers in this country, male or female, are targeting the wrong gender. Don’t make the same mistake.
Instead of lip-service to the women, give your lip-service to the men, and target women better. Fix your copy up so it sounds like real Ozlish as it is spoken today. Use sound bites. Include more detail and develop benefits that appeal to women. Buy media they see and don’t patronize. And please, before you do anything stupid, research with your eyes wide open.
(Deb) “Marketing could be done on the notion that it’s not the women in a situation, but if you market it to a constant powerful person, who had no qualms, and knew what they wanted, you might hit men and women, and maybe get beyond that marketing thing”.
I’m in Greville Street, Prahran, Melbourne – heaven for the hip. Everything is so correct, it’s almost not. The right looks, going into the right stores, buying the right things, taking them home in the right cars.
The people on the footpath are half my age. Most beautiful. Skinny little bodies bouncing along full of last night’s testosterone. Smiling to themselves, anticipating getting a bit more tonight. These people are so cool they don’t even need to try.
The first store I enter has music thumping from some tiny Northern African country mixing with the expensive perfume of the girl lazily drawing on her arm, who, I think, may be an employee.
She looks up at me for a split second. Takes in the sad fact that I’m balding, middle-aged, over weight and probably looking for my daughter’s birthday present and decides she doesn’t need to get up, I’m guaranteed to come over to her.
I wander around the store. It’s got the coolest of everything. Shoes, toasters, old magazines, art. And clothes so torn and raggedy looking you’d think they were for throwing out but they’re actually worth $500 and are the height of fashion.
The other people in the store are almost nervous this place is so now. I can tell they are wondering if their clothes/haircuts allow them to fit in or make them look out of place. I’m conscious that I am so completely out of the equation. It helps in a strange way. I don’t exist in this world. I am a ghost. Invisible.
The cynical marketer in me starts to enjoy the experience. I love it when I see a slick operation working. I start to appreciate the brand, the machine.
I stand and look around a bit more. Nothing in here is placed by mistake. Everything is just so because it adds to the brand. Even the girl who is supposed to be selling is doing it just the right way. By not trying. By ignoring me and all the other customers except the two or three who are also gorgeous, young, hip and rich.
How do you bottle this brand? This is the difficulty facing all retail. How do you get the brand experience so strong that your customer is in awe? How do you rip the dollars out of their credit cards and still have them begging to give you more?
Then about an hour later I’m in Chadstone. Where all these brands that have been developed in the kitchens and boardrooms of the entrepreneurs of this fine country slam into the heady reality of competition.
Chadstone, where one minute you’re in Sanity, with its attempt at I-don’t-care-rock and roll/hip-hop funkiness, mixed with a fair bit of industrial grunge, but clean (which kills it, I must say) right next door to another brand promising another vibe. The second perhaps aimed at child-encrusted young mums or perhaps empty nesters downsizing, looking for more efficient and stylish kitchen utensils.
If it ain’t selling, it ain’t retail
Cause that’s all that matters with retail. Selling. It has to work. It has to be the most efficient part of the marketing channel. You have to rip those dollars out of those consumers. We all depend on retail. It’s the final link in the chain. And by definition, the one that truly matters.
I’m thrilled to hear it when retail sales are up. We had a good Xmas. Coles Myer is making a profit. Just Jeans is floating. Retravison is announcing an interim dividend or whatever. It’s retail that drives our economy. Retail that pays most of our wages. Retail that forces change on recalcitrant manufacturers. Retail that drives marketers to advertise and keeps my crew and me in a job.
Staff have to sell
In Australia it’s not done well. In Australia, I can walk in and out of a store with money in my pockets. In some countries a customer entering a store is going through the same experience as an insect flying into a web. In those places they know about selling.
Here, the best service I consistently get is at a supermarket or a Bunnings, where I get self-service. I have walked out of more stores than I care to think about because I didn’t know where the item was kept and there wasn’t anyone around to tell me. I have stood in Myers electrical department waving $5,000 in my hand shouting could anyone help me to buy a TV/stereo. Staff are not expensive air warmers. They are not moving clothes hangers. They are in shops to sell. Why is it no one teaches them how to? Why is it that it’s so rare, that I can actually name the stores in Melbourne where I get good service?
Why is it the most consistent line I’m thrown is the very occasional ‘Just looking?’ Asked so they can be snubbed with a nod and neither of you has to actually communicate with the other.
They are bored out of their minds, usually. That’s why. Once you’ve asked a hundred people if they want help, and been ‘rejected’ more or less a hundred times, you’d rather die than do it again. That’s the fundamental problem with all retail. So the environment and the quality of the branding are critical for staff morale.
Bloody lucky we have good store designers and ad agencies to create brands in OZ or the business would be truly stuffed.
The Brand is the pull
The brand experience is everything in retail. You won’t go spend money where the brand experience is not right for the expectation. A top jewelry store like Kozminski’s or Tiffany’s is open, well lit, quiet, clean smelling, with a touch of expensive perfume, at a perfect 20 degrees. The staff is quiet-spoken, not too pretentious, the signage old, traditional but not flaking, the glass counters solid, well maintained. The velvet rich and deep coloured. The prices are frightening, but well concealed.
The brand experience in a fashion store is different. So it is again in a Muffin Break, an electrical retailer, and a fishing equipment place. They all promise the dream, deliver to the expectation. They must. It’s how well they do it, how well they convince you they know the subject, the business, which makes or breaks them.
But the brand is the tip of the iceberg
Once you have the brand right, it gets down to whether they are selling stuff that has enough inherent volume, their stores are well located and their products/services different enough from the competition to survive and prosper.
It also depends on the system inside the store. Is it designed to make it easy for the punter to get what they want and a whole lot of spontaneous sales along with it? Does the design work to take money from wood ducks like ants stripping the carcass of a moth?
The sale dilemma
One terrible impact on branding, profitability and often the whole general category of retailers, is a sales culture. This often creeps in when you have stupidity as key management criteria amongst a class of retailers. Take the bedding industry. I wish someone would, by the neck. In some parts of the world beds sell for more or less their full retail price. These places are where the retailers are aggressive, but in a service-oriented way. They organise you to have test-drives of beds and they’ll even get rid of your old bed for you. They don’t run sales every two weeks.
If I was buying a bed, and I am at the moment, I’d wait, like I am, for the next sale. And the stores worry about margin. How can you focus on good margins when you create a culture that automatically strips them?
How to make retail really sell
Get your brand personality right
It’s critical for you to know exactly what it is your stores are to stand for, what it is they are there to sell. Once you have that in focus, you must decide on the most efficient way of ensuring the customer will enjoy the selling experience and spend up big.
(I know most of you retailers will have this stuff already on paper, in style guides and worked out to the 9th degree, but even if you do, there’s no harm in re-looking at the issue. God knows many stores do it badly.)
Your branding must work on a tribal, psychological level. There is a mood, mindset that people must be in when they see/enter your stores. If they were not in that mood when they rounded the bend, three hundred meters from your shop, with the right branding, they will be by the time they are two meters inside your store.
A “surf” shop, sells cheapish, badly made clothes to young females who think it’s hip for their hips to be bare, is filled with boards, Hawaiian shirts, smelly wax and 50’s guitar music not because much of the stuff ever sells, but because it creates the brand.
External / Internal
Signage and layout must also work on a tribal, psychological level. It must appeal to that psychological level of that tribe at that stage in life. Even Blockbuster’s daggy big blue/yellow sign that looks like a piece of film tells you that’s ‘where the big movies are’.
Deliver on the brand’s promise
Your signage, especially internal ones, must match your ads – take shots from your TV, your catalogues and blow them up. Your prices must match too. God knows how many times the ‘specials’ simply aren’t visible.
Layout
Is absolutely critical. Make sure it reflects the pattern of how people buy your kinds of products. The order they wish to view them in. Usually with the high volume at the rear, so they have to walk past the others for spontaneous sales etc. Layout is an art form, a science.
Staff attitude/people themselves/uniforms
Are critical for branding and general selling. If the business is fashion and the target market is young thin things, you can’t have a whale serving, sorry. If it’s a big girls shop, don’t embarrass them by putting a skinny rake behind the counter. Most men won’t buy hardware from women, unless they are good looking, but women much prefer to buy from a woman, they feel they can trust them. Make the uniforms sensible and not clown–like. Uniforms are one of the key staff de-motivators. Ugly, and they hate getting dressed in the morning.
Staff need to be trained for the culture of a store. The branding can be ruined by an over zealous sales person.
Use smell/music/samples
The senses other than your eyes tend to work much more powerfully. Your eyes have thousands of options an hour, your nose might be lucky if it smells something really nice once a day. It will convince you to buy some cakes, some perfume. A dress. Most shoes smell great new. Music is even more emotional. It evokes a memory, a mood. Justifies a price hike.
Baker’s Delight always gives you a sample. So does any sensible deli. Tasting the food from a store is such a monty for getting a sale I can’t understand why food merchants don’t have people marching up the corridors of the shopping centers giving it away.
Change branding slowly, if possible
It’s damned expensive to change the branding, so you want to do it gradually if possible. The key question is ‘How do you keep it exciting and fresh?’ (So if they come back, they’ll want to again.)
However…
Branding in the real world. It’s hard for all the branding you bring together to be cool if you have little kids run through the store knocking over displays. Very hard to keep your brand essence pure and confident when their Mums run frantically after them apologizing to your staff while they scream at their kids to shut up and behave or they’ll be back in the car in the car park, in the sun, with the windows up. Like last year when it was legal.
Location, location
Traffic flow, convenience of turning, the locations arrangements to funnel cars/people through the turnstiles makes or breaks most stores. If it’s too hard to get there, you don’t. And keep in mind that most people won’t travel more than say 5 kilometres for anything, so proximity to main roads and your target market’s homes/work is a real issue.
Make it messy (unless it’s very expensive)
Old Sidney Myer used to go mad when they’d tidy up the store because the boss was coming in. He’d throw fabric on the ground, knock over the displays. Because he knew that people looking for a bargain go for the messy area first – that’s where others have obviously rummaged around. It means the stuff is cheap. Which is one reason why Daimaru, the upmarket Japanese store, failed in Melbourne. The place looked expensive because it was too neat. No one felt things were a good price, even when they were.
TV
Is the most cost-effective media for retail but you need size to justify the expense. The most efficient operators have a formula they run, a doughnut. The opening is pretty similar, the end always the same. (Logo, sound signature, website, addresses etc.) The middle part varies according to the deal.
Radio
I’m a big believer in radio at the right time. If they are in the car, they are potentially on the way. Hit them with radio when the store is open.
Letterbox drops
Get the distribution people to analyze your immediate area by income/age/lifestyle etc. and hit the key streets with regular reminders. It’s cheap, and if done well, very effective.
Direct Mail
Slightly more effective than leaflets, especially on target groups who are more dispersed. Or who have a history of shopping with you. Like cars or fashion. Sadly few use their databases well in retail. I’ve never had a letter from a hardware store, but I buy stuff from them all the time. I’d respond to a letter from a car dealer about now too.
Catalogues
The preferred vehicle for almost all retailers. Can’t fault it.
Local papers
Work with some target markets. Use big ads if you can afford the, as they stand out and they are relatively cheap. If you can’t go big, use a regular space, like the ears on the front, or a largish ‘island’ ad in the trade section etc.
Outdoor — on key arterials
If you want consistent trade hit them every day to and from work. Maccas usually have an ad some 2-300 meters before their stores. Why?
In-store — posters/colors/TVs/music
Use anything to get the message across. Seduce them with visuals and effects. The experience should work on them like hypnosis. Lulling the punter into confidence, into giving your store the trade, rather than spending it in the shop next door.
Always promise price
Every retailer has to offer or imply a price advantage, regardless of the facts. That’s life. They want a feeling of value for money, even if it’s a lot of money.
Always offer range
Everyone wants to feel they’ll have good choice of products, prices.
Over deliver
Promise less than you give them. Offer a small discount. Say that’s $15.25; give it to me for $15.00. Throw in a smile.
Time efficiency is key
Few retailers have worked this out yet. They think it’s very clever to keep people in their stores for hours. (Like the Casino concept – if they stay here long enough we’ll get it all.) Sorry boys, stupid idea. I was in the new Ikea store in Richmond the other day. Trying to find some shelves for my new office. At a full jog it took me 60 minutes to get through the store and out again. Admittedly I spent about 5 minutes looking at the shelves, but I no more want to go there again than fly to the moon. How can you ensure repeat sales if your customers want to avoid the time experience (loss) in your store? ah ha! I HATE IKEA for that very reason!
Quit, when you’re behind
The name of the game is stock turnover. If something is not selling, get rid of it at whatever price you can and move on. Use the money left to buy things that do sell well. Turnover and margin over time is the key thing, not just margin per unit.
Make it a better experience
On behalf of the rest of the economy, I implore retailers reading this to do a good job. Give the customer a great experience. Make it pleasant for them to visit your store. Sell them more than they expected. Keep the wheels of industry moving. A satisfied shopper, with a car full of stuff, is a happy, generous mum or dad. They will feel well fed (food stores), will have enjoyed better entertainment (electrics), will feel groovier (better clothes). We all want our fellow Australians to be happy. And a well-shopped person is a happy person.
Public relations is everywhere. Call me a cynical ad man, but I turn on the box and there’s a spin masquerading as news. I open a mag and there’s a spin masquerading as editorial.
Most of the big shows like 60 Minutes, Today Tonight etc. have a fair component of PR welded in like the roll bars in a rally car. Where it gets really nifty is in the manipulation of things that should be beyond it, like the law, by interested parties, particularly the political ones. Every decent politician has several Press Secretaries, seeding stories that work to push their boss.
You can be like a politician. You can have your company look like a combination of God and the Good Witch of the South if you think through how it could work, and you find the right help. Good PR is often one of the most cost effective things you can do.
Public Relations is just another tool for the professional marketer, like press or packaging. As such, don’t let the PR consultants tapping on your window big-note themselves into any other role. It’s like radio reps thinking they ought to get into the ear of the CEO. They would if they could, but should you let them?
While PR deserves inclusion in your regular armory, it has got severe limitations. for a start, it is the least accurate of the powerful media tools you can use. It’s like a bomb. Unstable, useful on your side, but nasty if it backfires. It ain’t logical. And it sure ain’t predictable.
PR is absolutely brilliant if you get it just right. A couple of minutes on national TV and all of a sudden you’re a household name. A couple of lines in the right newspaper or magazine can lead to sales for months to come. A couple of well worded sentences delivered to editors and you may be able to squash a story that might have resulted in you becoming a ‘consultant’ instead of getting a regular income.
But it’s hard to get it right. You’ve got to have just the right spin, convince just the right journo, do it on just the right day, sneak past their editor’s whims and hope WW 111 doesn’t start the hour your piece is planned to go to air.
At least with any other form of media you more or less get what you pay for. You buy a spot on Channel 10, and most of the time, you get a spot on 10. You buy a month’s worth of a PR consultant’s time and you may get something for it.
How to do good PR
I’m going to define good PR as PR that has a fair chance of achieving your goals. There are no guarantees with PR. With the big media players, no matter how much you spend on ads, most of the time it’s really lucky dip, like it or not. Yes, if you’re a major advertiser like a bank or a telco, you may have some influence, but the chances are, even then there’s a fair element of uncertainty.
Bond (with journos/editors)
Journalists like people. They did their course so they could lead a life doing the right thing and informing the public about issues that matter. The fact that they all work for robber barons who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about journalism or honesty does not mean they as people have changed. So make friends with them. Don’t be scared of them unless you have something to really hide, and if you do, change jobs.
Your PR people ought to know some of the relevant journos. Not all of them. With something like 5,000 publications in this country alone, you simply can’t know more than a few more than just by name. Suspect someone who claims to know all the journo’s unless they are a huge celebrity in their own right.
If you or your PR people bond well, it’s relatively simple to get articles in local papers/ trade mags, or work up stories over some months with magazine editors or TV life-style show producers,
Spin
The PR industry finds this term offensive. They even put a spin on what they do. They ought to come out and say, ‘Yes, we manipulate the public’, but that’s sounds nasty, so they say ‘we help people make more informed decisions’ or some other crap. But it’s all in the spin. It’s in the way you look at the situation. An intelligent, moral high-ground spin can turn a launch into a bonanza, a disaster into a great event and a nice little product into the next big thing we all have to get.
Take the moral high-ground
Journalists think like Disney. They have the most pronounced nice-person suburban values you can imagine. They will respond to those ‘doing the right thing’ every time.
Make it Interesting
I know you think your story is interesting, but nine times out of ten it isn’t. Something that you don’t feel comfortable about, or something that you think is irrelevant is often the most exciting story for an outsider. Please get a second opinion before sending out another boring release.
Write Well
Journos are language snobs. It’s their stock & trade. You should write as you speak, get the commas in the right place, do spell checks and try not to make too many grammatical errors. Like I can talk, huh?
Buy space
Whether they like it or not, editors in this country are heavily influenced by those who pay the bills. This is particularly the case in the trade rags, smaller independent papers, etc., but there’s no doubt if you’re taking out a decent slice of ads in a major magazine or newspaper, you get better treatment, regardless of what their editorial department may want to think. This has been taken to the extreme in the USA where those in real risk of community backlashes, like the nuclear industry, have taken to buying large blocks of shares of the media groups who are most likely to cause them grief.
One of the best ways to work the media is to sign up for a couple of months worth of ads on the condition that the ‘launch’ will be covered, or buy an ad on pages 4-8 if you get a nice story on pages 34-36. This can work with some publications, but must be handled very carefully or you’ll get an angry, nasty journalist and probably egg on your face.
Get on the phone
If you’re driving in the car and the radio has talk-back on a subject you think might work for your company, ring in. If you’re reading an article in a paper or maq, and there’s an angle for you, ring the journo. You never know where an instant contact will take you.
Have a kit ready
Always have a kit consisting of company brochures, an annual report, some snappy’s of management/you and some tight backgrounders on any subject you may have cause to promote ready. Now you’re only a courier away from a good story.
Print Something
People often go cheapskate in PR. They just type the story on letterhead and hope it will be noticed by the 300 journos they send it to. If it deserves to be noticed, do a professional job. It’s incredible what a small investment in printing or having your agency knock up a decent email PDF thingy will do for responses.
A picture tells a thousand punters
Visuals are essential. There’s almost no news that doesn’t work better with a pickie. The basics are a good photograph of the person making the claims (or footage of them speaking) and some kind of visual of the story itself. If you want serious coverage of a launch or whatever, it’s worth considering getting the whole thing taped by a film team, so the TV station’s don’t even need to send along a camera crew (damned expensive people) or having an artist’s impression or a moving 3D computer drawn version of the widgit etc. knocked up.
Check your list
Journos move jobs. Have the list checked against the latest copy of Margaret Gees Directory (lists almost every decent Australian journalist/publication) and get your staff to check the critical ones are still there.
Add a toy
Well, a present. A bottle of booze. Flowers. Tickets to the theatre. Free meals. A car for the week-end, or for months. A flight across Antarctica …
Fit with Vehicle
Make sure your stories fit the publication. That means their tone, their language style, their subject matter etc. Make sure they are seen as news. That’s NEW with an S on it, right? It only takes brains and some hours of decent application to put a good story together and then sell it through to the right people. That is asking a lot, I know. But journalists are intelligent people so don’t try to treat them other wise.
Pump Up The Volume
If you get a nibble from one vehicle, use that to convince journo’s in other media that it’s a strong story. Have them try to gazump each other. With the right sneaky pushing you can roll an article that might have appeared as a 1/4 page on page 47 of the Herald Sun onto the evening news.
Timing is everything
If there’s a story running on the news/in the paper you can connect with, don’t hesitate. You may not get another shot at it. Ditto if you’re doing a launch, make sure you’re having the function in time for the evening news, say finishing by noon.
Crisis Management
This is when you need to fly the crack troops in. You can manage damage with decent media training (see below) clever arguments and apparently honest responses, but you’ll only get half way and there’s a serious chance if there’s a kink in your armor, they’ll find it and drive the knife in. If there’s one thing a journo loves it’s discovering a lie or half-truth coming out of the mouth of someone who is making twice the money they are on. What works best in a crisis situation is a couple of hours with the best lawyers and PR consultants you can find and then complete honesty about the situation. People accept honesty. They accept that mistakes happen. Everyone makes them. And yes, sometimes a mistake costs those who make it.
“No, we did not know there was a leak. We would have fixed it. Yes it is a shame the children are now glowing in the dark. We’re considering our position, but personally, and I can’t be making any promises here, I’d like to think our insurers will be able to see their way to somehow assisting the families.”
Lies and cover-ups get found out. When the shit really hits the fan, be a decent person and do the right thing, just like your Mum taught you. It’s not worth walking around the rest of your life being thought of as a stupid, lying bastard.
Media Training
Good media training (have repetitive sound bites on pat, don’t look directly at the camera, wear conservative colours/clothes, be interviewed with the right background etc.) is absolutely invaluable. It’s like brushing your teeth. You look and feel better for it.
You should get an experienced ex-journo to interview you on the subject in front of a video camera and then watch the footage. Do it several times and you’ll start to see a new, nicer you coming through. But do us all a favor and don’t go completely bland or fake it. You can have personality, just massage the sharp bits off.
What to avoid
Mass Press Releases
You can hit lots of journos with a story, but it’s very much hit and miss. A dumb, self-serving press release sent out to a couple of hundred journalists will be tossed into the round file by almost all of them. The last figures I saw said the average metropolitan newspaper journalist is sent about 54 unsolicited Press Releases a day. What hope has yours got of getting a run?
Clutter
Keep the story simple and make sure it’s got paragraphs that can be cut out that won’t detract from the essentials, so the paper or mag editor can just edit to fit the space. In the case of TV, stick to one subject and just hammer the same thing home. Don’t try to fix the problems of the world because you have a Channel Seven camera in your face.
Using PR Best
Hire Your Own
If you work in a big company, it’s not a bad idea to hire a publicity person on the side. (Or you could save a few thousand and insist on media training for X launch or whatever and just slip it past the other people in marketing.) If you can manage to get your pickie in the trade rags, national newspapers or where ever, your career will almost always blossom dramatically. Whoever is the spokesperson is assumed by the rest of the world to be the one in charge.
Make your career
Have the tapes supplied to you. Play them in the board room at morning coffee time or when ever most of the staff/management will be around and sober.
How to Hire
Big companies usually like to hire big firms if they are not sure what they want and they don’t want to make a mistake. Fine. But you often don’t need a big firm. Most of the time a small team of one or two people will be much keener to get your business and will work twice as hard for you. I believe in hiring on fit. If you feel comfortable these people will be able to do the job, that’s a good start. Give them a small project and see how they perform.
Evaluate
Get your PR person to justify their retainer or hourly rate regularly. See the clippings. Have them compare the magazine page rates or TV time rates with what you got.
How they charge
PR firms tend to charge in two ways, they usually do a basic retainer which means they’ll work on your business, not your competitors and they’ll do some hours a month for it too. Which is all negotiable. Make sure you get a precise list of what they’ll be doing for the retainer. Then they charge for projects or crisis etc. also based on the hours involved.
Be Prepared for Disappointment
Often the editor can have a bad hair day, a full rag or your competitors will be interested in another out-come. And you won’t usually know until your story doesn’t appear. Or worse, appears with a nasty twist.
Who does it best?
I want to be a doctor in my next life. They have a PR machine so powerful, that when they have a problem like medical insurance costs sky-rocketing, they can get a show run on the ABC about it. MDA, Medical Defence Australia, that snappy show with Jason Donovan on it, has got to be one of the most incredibly well-planned coincidences in the history of Australian television. The Doctors have 30 odd years of shows from RPA to Chicago Hope pushing their barrel. They have a story on national TV at least once a week. Nobody does it better than the doctors.
If you’re in mining, or paper manufacture, or fast food, think how easy it would be if you had your own TV programs. If you’d like Starship to whip up a few story treatments for the board’s approval….
You are what you own in Australia. We are a shallow race. Paper thin. Whether it’s life or business, it’s the dumb basics that count here, on the edge of the known world. We go for what we see. What we can touch. Not for us the appreciation of fine wit or the poetry of lineage. Not for us the promise of potential. The chance that the person or the concept is so strong the project is worth lending against. No. Try chasing business investment when the backing offered is purely possible cash-flow and see the banker’s faces go ash-white. You need land for people, especially financiers, to take you seriously.
You can’t get anywhere with bankers or even local politicians if you don’t have a claim on a piece of Real Estate. People say they own a block of land when they own less than a couple of percent of it. Total strangers discuss their ‘investment holdings’ in the supermarket queue. They know they need to claim some credibility. It’s the biggest asset in most people’s lives and the driving force behind most fortunes and a fair few divorces. “Why wouldn’t I trade the bugger in? The house was worth over a million and I was sick of him. I could retire on that.”
Real Estate dictates a massive slice of the country’s alleged worth and the trade in it drives the building industry and stimulates all the others, from hardware retail, home wares, sheets and towels, furniture, to white goods, electronics, even your choice of food is affected by your living environment. Try serving BBQ chops and Big Red Sauce to a party in Toorak or Point Piper. I have. They think it’s a joke and don’t eat it, cause you’re obviously about to bring out the lobster.
Land is the fundamental physical asset that no-one can argue with. If you own Real Estate you can do things on it and make money from it. It doesn’t go away with a foreign exchange bungle or fly off to Cuba with your missus. And to quote the old Real Estate agent’s line, ‘They are not making any more of the stuff.’ So it has to go up over time. And go up it does. My family home (Mum’s) was bought 70 years ago for 5,000 pounds. That’s about 10 grand for those readers born after the sixties, who have never heard of pounds. It’s now worth close to a mill. Any way you do the multiplication, that beats the stock market and kills most financial/bond type investments. And it happens for virtually all land. (Except perhaps Moe)
Any dork can do it
Anybody can own land in this country. And any dork can sell it too. Don’t get me wrong. Many of my best friends are real estate agents. They are people who have a natural affinity with other people, often have good looks, and reasonable dress sense who drive nice cars. (I’m shallower than anyone.)
Selling real estate is one of the classic ‘used’ professions for private school boys and gals who don’t get into medicine, law or inherit the family business. One sells used shares, used money, used antiques or used houses. (Or used ideas and used designs, which most of my competitors are happy to sell to you.) The business can provide one with a healthy income, notoriety in the local area, plenty of free time if one happens to like mid-week golf, sailing or daytime affairs and it gives one close access to a proven investment strategy from the inside; perfect for the old boys network.
REAL ESTATE AGENTS
Your game is about listings
Anybody can get a good price for the right house, and yes, it’s damned hard work to talk someone up a couple of hundred thousand, but the selling end is the comparably easy part. It’s getting the gig in the first place that makes or breaks you.
Your business is about profile
When you are selling your home you have to trust somebody. The chances are you’ll interview three or four agents, decide who you like best, who’s promised they’ll get you the most and who’s regarded by your friends as OK, and they’ll get the gig. You can’t exactly see people calling agents they haven’t heard of. The agency business is hence just another brand and we marketers know you live or die on brand profile and positioning. In no other market is the ‘position, position, position’ line so ironic. It’s hard to differentiate when agents all wear similar suits, drive similar cars, work under identical professional guidelines, so the profile of the entity, the brand of the agency, is key.
Raising your profile
Make your brand desirable.
There are many competitors in every area and most use reds (for energy), Brunswick greens (for conservative values) or dark blues (for credibility), highlighted by either gold (for money) or silver (for money) or black (for ‘serious’ money). There’s the argument that you should show a building, there’s the argument that you should picture ‘happiness’ or ‘investment prowess’ (money again?). They have all been done. It’s a question of balance between simplicity – do they get the logo in the one or two seconds they look at the sign – versus stand out – will they remember our image long enough to call?
Get your positioning line correct
Hocking Stuart hit it right on the head with their fantastic campaign about the ‘hardest working real estate agents’. They straddled the key problem. How do you promise more for the vendor and not alienate the buyer? By promising both you’ll work harder, you skip that issue but still seem worth dealing with. The question is, what else can you say? The ones who try harder? The ones who are nicer to deal with? The ones who are more honest? The experts? Oh, please….
Get your branding bigger on ads
Yes, we all know the ads are for the benefit of the agent more than the vendor. Be up-front about it and make yours more prominent still. How well would you do if you could talk them into paying for a 50/50 slice? “Look, Mrs Public, your gorgeous house really shouldn’t dominate – we just need them to ring me and I’ll tell them all about it…”
Look after local causes
Any excuse to get your branding on high-traffic streets is worth using. Best causes are local kinders and school fetes; no-one can hate you for looking after the kiddies.
Get a real web presence
I can’t fathom why so many agents are allowing their brand to be beholden to the Real Estate.com type operations. For your brand/business to be powerful, you must have your own presence that may interact with them, but stands alone. And stands out.
Screw the local paper
And the local color supplements. And the dailies. They all survive on real-estate ads. You can gang up with a few of your mates and really screw them to the wall. Your competitors already do. Go for center spreads, back-pages, front cover ears and wraparounds. And do your own magazine as soon as possible. (See Hocking Stuart’s ‘Red’ magazine.)
Be a whistle-blower
A newsletter about real-estate prices and trends or relevant new legislation delivered regularly to your area works wonders. Best if it’s sent with a personal note if you happen to have met the occupants.
Work the suburb
Be the real-estate expert speaker at investment nights, banking seminars, be the auctioneer at the charity night, the sponsor of the local footy club, the prize giver at the cake stall.
Be there all the time
Remind us you exist with little notes through the mailbox, ‘Just passing, thought I’d see if you were interested’, letters about interest rates, school holidays, birthday, Xmas or Easter cards etc.
Get a fleet
You probably have a bunch of cars on the road. The same colour and model make for brilliant local presence, very popular in the USA, but almost never done in Australia. Why?
Do a uniform
It doesn’t have to be bright green blazers, but consistent colors and ties etc. make for solidarity in the team and power in your market.
Use pointers
Pointers indicating houses for sale are excellent branding tools. You can add more details, like why to choose you and use more of them than anyone else without anybody even suspecting – try running them for several streets, instead of just from the main to the secondary street.
Get renovating
Be the auctioneer on House Hunt, Renovation Revolution of whatever new show the stations cook-up this season.
Follow-up
I meet a lot of real estate agents and give them my name when I’m inspecting a house (understand I have two small kids and a small house – visiting prospective houses is a twice weekly past-time.) I almost never get a follow-up call.
SELLING DEVELOPMENTS
Brand the thing
People can imagine/remember a building or complex much more easily if it has a snappy name and an apparent reason for being, beyond simply lining the pockets of the initial investors.
Do it all
Do the brochures, the floor-plans, the ads, the web-site. The booklet on terms and the location map, the signage, the PR in the paper. The glamorous opening if you can. Call me a cynic, but the more glamorous and glossy the brochures, the more the public are prepared to spend on the same four walls.
Use internal photos and artists impressions of exteriors
Avoid people in shots where possible as they add expense, slow a shoot down incredibly and take the eye of the reader off the main game and confuse them. They’ll start deciding whether that person looks like them or their renters, when you really want them to think about design, location, square meterage and investment income.
The exception to this is in the retirement industry, where the decision is more about companionship than percentage returns, so the right people in that market are critical. Too young or old, too good-looking or too ugly and no-one will call you. Get the people and the promise just right and the phones ring off the wall.
Build the brand
Stay in the market for months. Let them see the ads lots of times and develop a personality by varying those ads like you would for a car or a brand of jeans. Have a ‘conversation’ with your prospective customers and you’ll foster a desire to inspect your development by becoming a multi-faceted person. Remember, the customer is almost always female. She is by definition a social animal and responds to a complex variety of approaches. You’ll be amazed at how the response rate per ad actually increases over time if you give them real reasons to want to see the place.
Use Direct
Build lists by competitions or by taking names and numbers during inspections. Work these people with direct mail. Simple, to the point and consistent with the overall advertising. Keep them informed about key milestones. But be patient. Often it takes months for a punter to get their act together to buy.
Dominate the area
Signage on the development is critical – the bigger the better. Night-time too even if you have to bribe the locals not to complain. Get ads on the arterial roads leading to your location. Traditional Outdoor works brilliantly and as most developments take months to sell, you get good value. Dominate the local paper with big ads as often as possible.
Work the contacts
If a proportion of your market is straight investors, the local accountants, investment and financial consultants, bank managers etc. are key contact points and should be visited and kept in the loop about progress – a weekly fax about completion dates, recent sales, inquiry rates, percentages sold, return on investments etc, works a treat.
HOW TO SELL YOUR HOUSE
There are countless books, TV shows and websites on this stuff so, as not to bore you, I thought I’d list the things not to do instead. Don’t sell in the height of the season, write off Spring. Don’t Auction in a down-market and don’t Private sell in a boom. Don’t go cheap on your advertising or go to the market too quickly (do a 6-week campaign).
Selling or buying Real Estate is more emotive than having a baby. People lie awake at nights for weeks at a time wondering if they have painted the garage door the right colour, or whether to remove the lino in the bathroom. I think that’s all very sweet, but the real thing to keep in mind is that selling a house is a competitive market like any other. People shop for similar houses in the same area, and they are usually only in the market for a few weeks. You may be asking too much for a three bedroom brick Victorian. They may have five others to choose from that month. Alternatively, you may get the timing right and find yourself selling the only decent home for their needs. It’s the timing and the timing alone that makes a huge difference in getting a high price. Back to demand and supply – from Marketing 101.
I’ve put my attentions towards domestic real estate, in the above, but the basics remain the same for commercial real estate – the only real difference is that in commercial you are dealing with people who think it’s a purely financial consideration, so you need to kid them what is really a very emotional decision is all very business-like. If you want to copy everyone else use daggy typefaces, bad photography and talk dollar/percentage returns.
I’m running late to get home and I’ve forgotten the car’s getting serviced. Yuck, I have to slum it with the public. I race down to the tram stop, read the Adshel poster in about 10 seconds and wait. Check out the drivers pulling up at the lights in the hope that someone I know might come along and give me a lift, or I could be really lucky and get picked up by a bored M.I.L.F. in a four wheel drive, heading my way. Sure.
Ten minutes later I’m still waiting. Finally the Tram trundles over the rise near the office and slides it’s way down the steel tracks. It stops opposite me and the 5 other people who have also been waiting for quarter of an hour or more now. It’s packed. We squeeze in. I dodge under arms, between stomachs and skirts. I push my $3.20 into the machine and collect my ticket. Over the course of the trip I’m the only one who buys a ticket. I make a mental note to inform someone important about that. I spend much of the rest of the trip wondering who would care enough to do anything about it.
I stand near the door, but where I can grab a rail, so I don’t fall over when it jerks alive and takes off.
Slowly the tram empties as the little insects who work in the city go back to their concrete cocoons in the suburbs to rest until tomorrow when they can come out all pretty again for another day of busily working making honey for the hive.
I finally get near a seat. I look around, yes, I’m the oldest and ugliest, so they, by leaving it empty near me, indicate it’s mine, if I want it. You have to let the elderly or a pregnant woman sit first. At first glance I’m a fitting combination of both. It’s got a crumpled paper on it. As I sit down I open the newspaper and read. The articles are in bigger type than a standard paper. They are shorter, with more pictures. There’s not as much in car ads or sport, the business bits are more dot.com, less mining/agriculture, it’s less family, more young-adult based celebrity-gossip.
This is MX, grabbed for free, read, then discarded. Picked up again by the next person, ditto. Their readership stats say a conservative 2.5 readers. I’d estimate it at more like 4, but it’s been at least a decade since I did any work for Roy Morgans, or for that matter, Newscorp, so what do I care?
MX breaks all the rules
It’s not aiming at middle Australia, it’s aiming at the younger up and comings. It’s free. Given they wouldn’t pay for it if it wasn’t, it’s an attempt by Rupert’s boys to grow the habit of reading a newspaper amongst a class of reader who they believe, rightly, is more inclined to go digital than paper. It’s an interesting business model for Newscorp.
But it does give you, the advertiser, one good argument you can use in negotiations – when they say ‘paid for’ gets better readership, than say free local papers, ask them about MX.
MX is one of the 70 daily newspaper publications in OZ. The biggies, as you’d already know, are the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne’s Herald Sun, The Age, Brisbane Courier Mail, Financial Review, The Australian etc. but there’s also about 35 regional city papers.
Most newspapers have features that vary by day of the week, and occasional Magazines they toss in as an incentive to buy. The normal key sections of Lifestyle, Travel, Automotive, Entertainment, Business, Classifieds, Sport etc. are overshadowed by Early General News, which is anything from 16 pages to 52 pages long, depending upon the publication, the day of the week and the time of the year. EGN is charged at a higher rate, and there are ‘loadings’ for anything they can think of you might want to do, like run on a right hand page, buy consecutive pages, a back or front or wrap-around or etc. All of these extra rates are highly negotiable and all are available, depending upon what’s been prior sold and when you want to do it.
All of the major publications have web sites and other on-line versions, all work with other publications on various promotions and all are owned by large organizations who could care less about you as an advertiser.
They are interested in bottom-line and use their considerable political power to make or break governments according to what that party is prepared to do, to further their financial ends. Hence the reason we have just had our media ownership laws changed. You tell me what benefit there was for the Australian people in allowing media groups to sell off shore, to consolidate and to own more than one channel in a market? I can’t see one for the public. But I can see plenty of advantage for the media barons in lessening competition. Personally, I’d like to only have one or two ad agencies in the country to compete with, but then again, I don’t have any sway in keeping little Johnny in power, so how could I hope for such a result?
The sad truth about falling circulations
The circulations are falling as we go more digital. This affects your long term use of them – some may not survive the next 10 years, but in the short term it makes stuff all difference. A tool is a tool, even if it is getting rusty. I don’t blame the journalists for this slow decline. They are given instructions, their articles are accepted or not.
I do blame editorial policy, which runs scared in most main-stream media today and avoids any subject or treatment of a subject they assume the Packers or Murdoch’s would not sanction, more’s the pity. But who I really blame for falling circulations is the advertising agencies of the vehicles themselves. The papers don’t deserve the slide they get when they get their advertising wrong. But shit it proves advertising works (or doesn’t sometimes). Every year some agency gets the ‘lucky break’ to do ads for one of the big paper groups. Every second year they do a comic – Icpotta, Herald Hound Dog, this year’s worst is ‘General Knowledge’, which I’ll come back to cause it deserves a true basting (a cooking term for pouring searing fat over a lamb roast).
Every other year they do a pretentious black and white arty series of up themselves ads like The Age’s series last year. ‘Oh, we have a history of printing in black and white. Isn’t it pretty?’ I’m waiting on next year’s sepia version, resplendent with horses or vintage cars or may-be bi-planes, for some light relief. And don’t I hate the Herald Sun’s General Knowledge ads? Like it’s funny to do a guy in an army outfit, cause hey, that means ‘general’, get it ha ha? The General Knowledge ads are plain horrible – is it voice-overed by the same guy who does that lame TV show David Tench? Why do they think a deep-voiced try-hard is funny still? It might have been in 1973 or 83, but we’ve had 20 or 30 years of this joke. Get new material. Think about changing our perceptions of the printed word or we’ll keep going away from it.
Full of themselves
Papers have this quaint belief that they are still a really powerful media. They have some power. But it’s a tenth of what they had ten or twenty years ago. One hundredth of what they had before TV. But they still account for at least $1,680 million in advertising (2002 figures). And in those days represented some 28% of national media spend.
As a media we can take them or leave them like we choose Singapore Noodles or Suchi for lunch. We, like all agencies, couldn’t care less. Would we miss the Herald Sun? The Age? Often up to ten centimetres thick of mashed, bleached pine-tree filled with discounted ads. You are daily wasting valuable paper resources. You are daily putting tonnes of poisonous ink into the ecological stream. Daily polluting our precious air delivering your product via dirty diesel trucks. You are a dinosaur which hardly justifies it’s existence in this hyper-sensitive world. Be relevant. Be exciting. Or be gone. If I was running the editorial policy of newspapers, I’d keep that in mind.
Still, papers exist, they are good for advertisers to get their message to readers, how to buy and what works best?
Why Buy?
Sheer punch. The greatest advantage of newspapers is their ability to deliver to you millions of eye balls literally, tomorrow. There is no other media, save blanket TV at a cost of millions, (and can you knock up an ad for TV in an arvo?) that can get your story to that many people, that fast.
Choose Wisely
Negotiate heavily. A full page, EGN Saturday in a major newspaper can cost you over $40,000. 40K? Remember your ad lasts a day then ends up wiping some homeless man’s bum. If it’s not that urgent, you might as well shoot a low budget TVC, airing it for a couple of months. You’d get more longevity, frequency and probably have more people see your ad.
Size
Obviously full pages get the punters attention, but yes, you pay for it. They do allow you to do a more emotional sell. However, using elegant strip ads and especially horizontal spreads, say over two pages, can have a lot of impact.
Buy Half Pages
A recent highly scientific, credible study (from 160,000 observations) in Sweden proved you get 95% of the readership for a half page, as for a full – at half the cost?
Use small space
Small, well located ads, with a lot of white space in them, work very well in newspapers. Especially little pointers that send the punter to your main ad on page 39 or wherever.
If they’re older, go smaller. Younger, bigger
The older your customer, the more they’ll spend time reading a paper. Younger people read a paper for 18-20 minutes, the over 65 may spend 37-38 minutes on the same publication. And the older people respond just as well to smaller ads – they read the whole paper, not just flick through it – they have time.
Advertise in relevant pages
Travel Packages in the travel section, hopefully not near the page where the latest terrorist attack is being discussed. Breaking this rule also works too – if you go in EGN instead of the Real Estate section, for example. And keep in mind EGN is not what it’s cracked up to be. The same Swedish study I mentioned earlier also proved ads on page 65 were almost as read as ads on page 5, for often much less cost?
Buy Distressed
Most of our clients have a variety of ad shapes that can be slotted in when deals fall out of the sky, as they often do. If they know you’re good for an occasional quick and dirty one, they’ll call you when they need space filled. That reminds me of someone I knew years ago when I was single and much thinner and had hair….
Buy regular space on a particular day
Pick one, say a Friday or a Tuesday? Nice if the location/day is relevant to your product or service. Doing anything regularly builds your brand’s reputation in a subtle, powerful way.
Buy 3 days in a row
If you’re in a hurry to get a message out or a sale sold out, buy over a few days – many people read only one day a week. A few loyalists will buy almost every day. You’ll often get both with a concentrated campaign.
Strong Ads work
Large blocks of colour always help in getting attention as the rest of the page will invariably be a sea of black and white, or designer soft colours, so using bold vivid colours is definitely an advantage. On cheap newsprint will lose their sharpness, but are still better then using tints of colours, or light pastel shades.
In addition to using contrasting colours, use large clear fonts, as papers can bleed and appear washed out and the reverse side of the page, which could be someone else’s bold ad, will often show through.
Be topical
One of the key creative differences many agencies don’t quite get with newspapers, is that they are intensely now. Using current events and incorporating them into creative is extremely effective. If you can knock up a clever ad that makes a point about an event that’s current, like a war, resignation, Court finding or whatever, the public love it. They know how hard it is to get something done in a day and appreciate it. It says you’ve got your act together. Next time you insist on the marketing department running absolutely everything past the board or the US management, think about that.
Book the ad next to a story
There’s a constant tit for tat war going on between Media Watch and various newspapers regarding this. Was Schumacher’s ad for a Swiss watch booked before the article was written about him etc? Who cares? It’s relatively easy to get news stories written if you book enough space often enough. Ask Telstra.
Brand
Have your branding consistent in all press ads. Especially the way your ads are laid out, unless you’re being very creative. Which is not a bad thing. We often use different colours or when sub branding, as it helps to differentiate each brand.
Get feedback
Measure responses by running separate phone numbers, web addresses. Or add a coupon to ads to get the reader to interact at the same time.
Go classic
Write a catchy headline and contrast it with an image so they are intrigued enough to read the body copy for an explanation.
Go Colour
Colour ads outsell B&W or spot colour every time.
Clear concise information
Keep your story simple. Even if you use long copy, don’t let the reader get bored or they will just flick the page. It’s even easier than hitting the remote on a TV.
Always cross-promote
With radio or outdoor or TV or leaflets. One media on it’s own rarely works well and a two/three media campaign works best. And work in with the on-line operation – so many ads run in the paper but not on the web site. Dumb.
Close
Make sure the phone number and website is big. Even with a branding ad, that’s not meant to be ‘retail’, don’t fail to give them the means to act now, should they wish to.
Positive Trends
They are getting more open to broken space, interesting layouts (see De-graves ad) illustrations and developing some personality in some sections. You could say it’s about fucking time.
As a conclusion, if you are interested in more intelligent, better-educated customers, newspapers are a good option and they won’t die any time soon, regardless of what the on-line wankers keep saying.
‘For all of the women you are’. Early nineties TV ad for a magazine I think. Don’t know whether it actually sold any more bits of pretty coloured paper or resulted in any more trees being tossed on the altar of Rupert’s financial empire, but nice ad cause I remember it. Could be because I often see myself wavering between male and female, young and old. Don’t we all? Could well be said as ‘for all of the people you are’, but that wouldn’t have worked with either sex, now would it?
We are different people at different times. When you’re playing soccer with your mates for a 40th birthday at 7am, that’s you being ‘Mr sporty/blokey/modern’. When you’re eating breakfast with said mates and a good-looking woman of 30ish walks into the café, instantly you’re ‘Mr Sophisticated businessman who might be a great boyfriend.’ Depending upon the occasion, you can be any of hundreds of possible people who float around inside your head, and only pop up to the surface when required. How many of us males are James Bond one minute, Brad Pitt the next? The various people you live within will often determine how you react to marketers messages. Why will you buy a certain beer? If you’re with that soccer playing crowd, you’d buy Boags. If you’re drinking with their dads, you might get a VB. It’s often to fit in, often to confirm where you see yourself.
This is a real headache for marketers who want to be able to neatly slot punters into easily hit demographics. But humans ain’t like that, and that, in a nutshell, is what makes our career so interesting and so frustrating at the same time.
Psychographics give you more meaningful, powerful brands. They are a move beyond simple, dumb demographics. You segment consumers by lifestyle, attitudes, beliefs, values, personality, buying motives, and pattern of product use. The psychographic characteristics of a market affect not only advertising but also packaging and channels of distribution –anything that is your brand has a definite psychological finger print, whether you want it to or not. Although many decisions are based on assumptions about the psychological make-up of our customers, in OZ it’s very much an under-used marketing discipline.
Segmentation in Oz too shallow
Traditional demographics (age, income, geog, education etc.) means so little in most purchases. Why is it my bookkeeper drives a BMW and my richest friend an old Ford? Why is it that expensive chocolates sell to bogans and Brighton bimbos at the same rate?
It’s not so much who, it’s why
What a more sophisticated system of segmentation does for us is move the understanding of our markets and customers past the basic ‘who is buying’ to the much more important and frankly more easily influenced area of ‘why are they buying’? Why is it more easily influenced? Because if you know why people do things you can adjust that reasoning with information/branding messages. If you only know who does it, all you can do is change media buys to get different people who do the same thing.
Is it just why?
No, it’s also how they think, how they change behaviours, how they trade things off, how what you as an organization says, that they respond to or ignore.
Where minds meet lifestyles
What’s brilliant about psychographics is the sheer coming together of standard marketing metrics like sales and customer basics with a better understanding of the customer’s real motivations. You get how they buy and why they buy and what will influence them to buy, more than just who the hell they are.
Hard to get hold of
Many of us in marketing roles only get glimpses of this information and we often have to guess about our customers’ motivations from observed behaviour – the punter picks up the butter after having bought the bread – did the bread purchase influence the butter, or was that irrelevant? What if you knew he was baking a cake that arvo, would that have changed how you looked at his behaviour?
If you knew that most people saw your product as the more traditional butter (higher fat content – better to make cakes – I’m talking informed cooks as a customer base – which you’d never find with demographics), then maybe your advertising would be making that baking connection instead of trying to compete against lower fat products by sponsoring the anti-obesity programs at primary schools that your agency has you in now? Yes, makes them feel good about their promotion of ‘Eastern Star’, but does it sell any product?
Psychographics require real research
The big downside of taking on this more complex marketing segmentation approach is that bugger all research companies know how to model it. Don’t get me wrong – they’ll gleefully find bits of information that go towards making up psychological segments – especially attitudinal stuff like ‘The brand I think of when I see gum trees’ or ‘your low-fat milk goes with tennis and red sports cars’, but when they are commissioned to put together customer profiles, they invariably identify the most attractive tip and miss the 80% who don’t fit that exact mould.
Rarity in mid-marketing land
Very few marketers in smaller companies even come across detailed psychographic profiles. Most mid-weight marketing managers are doing it by osmosis – they just inherently know (or get the right agency) what will turn on the customer, and how to say it.
Big guys miss it too
I was being briefed by a big utility only a few days ago and they said ‘our customer is everyone’ – clearly reflecting that they did not know which groups of ‘everyone’ would be better to target before others. They had obviously conducted some demographic analysis but done no psychographic overlays. So they were like a fisherman saying – the big fish are out there in the ocean – not knowing that they might be on the reefs, in the gutters or only around at night if you used a blood-based berley, out-going tide…
Coining psychographic segments
Over the years a raft of people, particularly media groups like Fairfax (or the commonly used ‘Mosiac’, which is essentially ABS stats run over a fairly standard attitudinal) have invented their own versions of ‘proprietary’ psychographic segments.
Relying on these is inherently dangerous. Most brands/markets require specific segments to be coined for them. There is simply no point in trying to fit a series of segments that were developed for a completely different range of decisions to your buying circumstances. It’s like getting someone who’s good at making cakes to cook Asian soups. Occasionally it does work. But I’d rather create my own segments, if I was a Marketing Manager.
Funky Naming
Forget actually knowing what these segments mean, the best thing of all is a sensational name for the segments you invent. I’ve always liked three-barrelled ones. You can sell a name like ‘Angry urban, older struggler’ to any self-respecting board member. But be careful how you treat your own brand – you can’t adopt a name like ‘Party-pooper’ to describe its key customers for example. See how much of yourself you can throw in without getting caught – many is the young product manager who insists the talent/props/outfit has to be so, so, just cause that’s what she wants in real life.
Finding and defining
Research
While many use qualitative (personal interviews, affinity or focus groups etc.) research at the front end, what is critical in psychological segmentation is sheer numbers. If you have a very specific target you may get away with smaller numbers, say 200-300 or so surveys, but when you are going for mathematically valid segments in big markets, like soft drinks, cars, you might need at least 1000 participants.
Assessing research
Most research companies just need to be told you are looking for X, Y or Z and they’ll work out a way to evaluate it. Don’t be conned by the traditional psychologists who think only one of their breed can conduct this survey. It doesn’t hurt to have someone on the team with a psych background, but it’s plain bunkem to leave them in control – they don’t get how marketing works and you’ll end up with important sounding segments you can’t explain to your sales department or buy media in. Make sure the elements they supply are useful, actionable.
Limitations in development
There are many problems we run into with using psychographics without applying the bull-shit detector.
One is cross-over – many people can fall into various segments depending upon their circumstances at the time. This, of course varies due to time of the day or year too.
Too narrow gaps – often there are too many segments created due to a multiplicity of attitudes/motivations. It takes a ballsy marketing manager to just dump one large group because they don’t fit her goals on an ROI basis.
Hopeless oversimplifications (adland is rife with this) ie. ‘Gen Y hates authority’ (insulting to think you can put all of a generation into a definition) –when they worship bands/stars – it’s a different definition of authority, but it’s still authority.
Buying behaviour not fully explored – Often it’s households who buy, not necessarily individuals. For years the car industry thought that men bought more cars because they were the ones who came down to the car yard and test drove the cars, did the negotiations and signed the paperwork. Wrong. They are simply the collector – much as the truck driver who picks up the widgets from your warehouse is not the buyer of your widgets.
How to do it well
Commission your own researchers, be open-minded about subject matter, be very hi-tech – on-line is getting really good now, be demanding about accuracy and measurability. Insist on meaningful strategy as an outcome.
Limit your ‘care zone’, but not at the front
Make sure you keep the reach wide at the front end, but when you’re drilling down, don’t fuck around with too many peripheral segments.
Get involved
Go to the groups/do the pilot yourself.
Trust your gut
The best research findings come when you include what pops into your mind at 3 in the morning.
Best fit vs. some fit
Psychographics are not an exact science. You can’t get perfection unless you pay hundreds of thousands and even then it will be out of date in a few months. But they are brilliant indicators of tone – what to generally say in your communications, to whom.
Aim the ads right at them
Hit em in the face. Then target the next profile group differently. Obviously if a product caters for more than one psychographic group, there needs to be more than one campaign – at least more than one ad.
Global campaigns can’t do this
It’s in psychographics that the inherent weakness of global branding is so blinkingly apparent. As this more complex way of looking at markets is influenced by things like religion, the way the kids are brought up etc, segments typically vary massively in a geographic sense. No matter how hard you try to apply mid-western American values to ads targeting people in other countries, invariably they miss by miles. If someone who weighs 120 kilos can waddle out of their Fundamentalist Church and straight into a Maccas carrying a handgun in a holster and order a bar-b-que beef burger, see an ad on SUV’s, and want to buy that SUV, how do you expect a skinny, non-violent vegetarian Indian mum to relate to the same ad? Amazingly, she doesn’t. She might earn the same, have the same education, be the same age, have the same job, same number of kids. But she ain’t the same person. Doesn’t have the same values or motivations. She’s as turned off by your ads as the guy in Utah is turned on by them.
Create your own pies then segment
Rather than buying into standard psychographic segments some research company (or media group) is trying to sell you on, consider whether this is just a complete waste of time or whether you might be better off to create and name your own segments.
4-6 for most brands is enough
You can’t make more than that in sizes or price points, you can’t put out there more than 4 or 5 ads anyway. You can’t get your sales team to understand more than 4 types of customers and you can’t look too confused to the public about what you stand for.
Media focus
Psychographics become very real when you’re trying to hit difficult groups. Let’s talk about younger males, who are ‘notoriously hard to reach with conventional media’. Which is actually crap, but let me digress. People do what people want to do. In the case of younger males, they are interested in no particular order, in music, sex, computer gaming, sport, sex with a partner, cars and their futures, which means studying or first jobs etc. Each of these interests can be broken down further, depending upon age group, peer group, physical location (hard to get into ice hockey in OZ as there’s hardly any ice). All of these interests can be bought somehow in a media sense. You can get to them. You can sponsor the sports or the key players, you can buy ads in the magazines they associate with them, finance a you-tube show on them.
Why it’s hard for media groups to buy for younger males is simply because media groups are peopled by younger females who are as removed from the lives of younger males as I am from Mars. And those mid-twenties girls don’t have the brains (to ask how), the budgets or the systems to get hold of younger males so they say it’s too hard.
Media buying
Yes, you’ll do ads targeted to different people and head sets etc in the same media, but it’s where you buy and when that is critical. Different people read different magazines, look at different websites, different TV shows, different sections of the newspaper. While the Australian media industry has hardly explored these differences, as a market researcher, they scream out at me like searchlights in the night sky. You know the reader of Belle is different to the reader of Women’s Day, even the same person has a different head set when involved in different media environments.
Buy on the basis of fit with your target groups. I know this is marketing 101, but so many marketers get convinced by a media buying group to go for cost per thousand over fit per reader. Thinking marketers would rather talk to 2000 fully qualified leads (for a tenth the cost) than 200,000 maybe’s, (regardless of the lower cost per thousand) especially if they can only sell 1000 widgets a week anyway.
Influencing minds
This is the key reason to go down this path of segmentation. You get to understand how your customers think and thus influence it.
I was watching a documentary the other day and the blissfully self-indulgent Simon Reynolds was wafting on about how advertising can’t influence people and it’s just a mirror to society. I understand that may be the political angle taken by the AFA etc. to keep the punters happy in the belief they control their own lives, but it’s a lousy admonition if actually true – what’s the point of paying ad agencies millions if the bastards can’t do anything?
The fact is marketing managers and boards know advertising influences people and that’s why major boards bother to use psychographics to get their message tighter, their returns on ad dollars that much better. The process of better understanding your customer pays huge dividends.
I order the calves liver, rare. Bottle of young Pinot, green salad. We’re sharing the oysters ‘cause there’s five varieties and both of us are wondering what makes a Cockle Bay oyster any better or worse than a Coffin Bay one.
I’m lunching with one of my favorite comrades in arms who runs a PR company about the same size and vintage as Starship. We are bitching about client expectations and the encroaching squeeze of the ghost recession (the one you can’t see but makes you feel all cold and giddy) and she starts to get angry about a particularly good-looking ex-customer of hers. I take another swig of the wine and sit back and watch her get into the swing of it.
She begins telling the background, the brief, then quickly goes into the nitty-gritty, the frustrations, the billing arguments. I start to get a feeling of impending danger as she becomes more and more angry. It’s like seeing a kid shaking up a bottle of coke before they twist the cap and the whole back seat of the car gets sprayed a sticky light brown.
She’s about to spit out the clients name (and probably their bank details) in front of the increasingly disturbed people seated within a few metres of us in this crowded inner-city restaurant. I put my finger to my pursed lips – like your mum did when your sister was asleep next to you on that same back seat.
‘Oh fuck it’ she says, ‘He’s a fucking Architect and any publicity is good for those fuckers, you know’. ‘Yes’, she says, very loudly to the now staring crowd. ‘Bob Hills (not his real name) doesn’t deserve even one of those fucking awards, I’ve won them all for him and he’s still with his fucking dragon of a wife, after all we’ve been through together…. Fuck him. I did and what did it get me?’ She stares around, challenging the room.
People instantly go back to their black squid-ink linguini. Eyes on their food. Waitress, dumbstruck, comes over and fills up our glasses. Clink, glugg glugg, glugg. For some time I listen to the gentle scraping of the finished plates in the kitchen 30 metres away. Yep, that sounded like the plop of an olive into the bin. No-one says a word, still.
Most peaceful ten minutes or so I’d ever spent in South Yarra. And I used to live there on and off for more than a decade. Quieter than a Sunday arvo nap on the couch.
Professional Services. Frustrating? Political? Marketing under water. You know what to say. You know who to say it to. You know them so well you can see the whites of their eyes. But get a budget to do it? Not a cent. You’re moving your mouth, but nothing comes out. As a marketer, would it make you angry?
Professional Services Marketing is dominated by women who are in turn dominated by men. These are professional women (some men, don’t get me wrong) usually in their 30’s who in the main have at least one degree in marketing/business, many two or three, some years in the real marketing world getting widgets to move through supermarkets or people to change telco supplier, who have been employed (basically under false pretences) by big legal, accounting, engineering, management consulting or architectural firms to help market the firm. They are given some directions, told they have an open brief and then when the ink is only just dry on their employment contracts, promptly have their hands tied behind their backs and are made to sit in the corner with a gag on their mouths.
Dominated by men who have a real lack of imagination (which is why they studied law – everything is based on precedent and argument – both safe places or studied accounting – everything is based on history – ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t control it’, studied architecture, again a safe, unimaginative profession, at least in OZ – ‘it’s not a building until it’s built’, or studied engineering – ‘but will it really work?’) who by inarguable scientific fact have the trust capacity of a twice-bitten very shy 3 year old child.
Any form of promotion in a broad sense can’t really be tolerated because the firm’s reputation for conservative, well-considered, reliable advice would be thrown instantly into flagrant disrepute if you did anything anymore out-there than change the type-face on your letters from good old sensible Plantin to something blatantly racy like Verdana.
This leaves a very professional marketer with only so many weapons in their armory.
And bossy? Did I mention how bossy boots the business is? How they don’t take anything seriously if it isn’t from their discipline? All the lawyers only listen to other lawyers…. all the accountants…the fact is, if you ain’t one of them, you just ain’t. So it’s damned hard to get them to think in a marketing sphere.
How big is this Professional Services gig? Current estimates are there’s about 4,000 marketers working in this kind of role in OZ, if you count in the juniors etc.
The vocation is thankfully growing quite rapidly as more and more professional firms see a need to promote themselves in an effective fashion. This growth is massive in Asia, where they take to the concept of professional marketing better than we do here. According to a report by Seldon Gill, Asia has the highest percentage of senior marketers under 40 (86%). With emerging growth in the Middle East, particularly Dubai. Hence, if you think you might like big weird buildings, lots of oil money, swarthy, hairy men in badly-fitting dresses and a wild night-life amongst drunken ex-pats behind tightly closed doors, head north west.
The commercialization of PSM that has taken place in the last decade has created a proliferation of specialist roles (e.g research, business development, practice management and client relationship management) – so there’s a few different things you can do within these organizations, and you can probably benefit from some specialist training to get your gig really pumping.
On that subject, about 80% of participants in that same report have been in their jobs for less than 4 years. To quote the PSM Association “It is not uncommon for people to reach a point in a role where they are no longer challenged, or can be better rewarded for their skills and experience elsewhere.” Which is nice corporate speak for ‘they got bored and sick of having no money so they nicked off to FMCG where they could play with a real train set, instead of just being given Barbie dolls’.
Pros & Cons of the job
Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why you’d find it a challenge trying to promote a big law firm or bunch of engineers; they haven’t done anything before. There’s bugger all brand. There’s bugger all USP, bugger all real awareness out there in consumer land, so you can create the whole package from the ground up. But it’s hard to do the whole thing without a real budget.
Things you can do without a budget
I don’t know for sure why women are more likely to be working in industries that don’t give marketer’s budgets, but I think it’s somehow connected with their perceived role of themselves – as the person who has to make up pasta from stale flour and eggs – not the person who says ’where’s dinner?’
You can’t do much without a budget. Yes, you can organize lunch (I’m told by a very reliable source that the largest law firm in Australia spends around $5 million a year just on lunches – sure beats my expense account) with a local caterer if they’ll invoice the accounts department directly, and you can get nicer letterhead printed with the local printer, which means you can do a bit of direct mail, but you can’t exactly run any other sort of campaign on sleight of hand alone. “Its pretty hard to go into the jungle and fight the opposing army when you’ve got a pocket knife and they’ve all go M16’s. Especially accounting firms, they assume that you can compete with far less ammunition because you work under THEIR umbrella.” Accounting firm’s business development manager.
What to do if you’re in Professional Services Marketing?
Remember, technology is your friend
There is a silver lining to that cloud. And that is the web and all it’s electronic tentacles. If you can track what partners spend on ‘marketing’ – lunches, direct mails, golf afternoons, phone calls, speeches etc. you can bring into their behavior disciplines based on numbers and results. This dramatically alters the power base from one of attempted justification of marketing efforts to rock-solid directives about time spent where, on what, with whom. Fun for you, hell for a senior partner.
Get specialised
Law firms think they are different from engineers, different from property investors etc. You need to be able to demonstrate specialization, just like their key people do. “Marketing in law firms was traditionally done by PA’s and receptionists, but they are beginning to acknowledge to specialised skill set required for successful marketing campaigns. It’s taking a while”. Law firm Marketing Manager.
Focus on what you can do
Yes, budgets are tight or non-existent, but they are starting to grow like mushrooms. Respondents to a recent survey in the industry said that they expect the more general work to increase in the areas of marcomms, public relations, research, event management, direct mail and brand.
Give them causes to hang onto
In that same survey, corporate social responsibility was not seen by participants as a pressing issue. Let’s face it, how are you going to get a bunch of lawyers to feel guilty about anything? So there’s an instant gleaming opportunity for canny marketers. Instead of the obligatory bike ride around the Bay with the partnership’s corporate colours stretched across 30 or so fat, sweaty biker stomachs, how about you get them cleaning up the Brisbane River or saving little kiddies from being mauled by pedophiles on the web?
Change the way clients interact with your firm
Firms interact with clients on an almost daily basis. This leads to deep relationships with clients but also makes for tedium. Is there another way you can get to old or new clients, another way you can operate that would shake up the market but not come across as nutty? The web was new once. So were faxes, if I remember correctly.
Cut the layers
Get around the system. The normal pecking order is Senior Partner, Senior Partner’s PA, Senior Partner’s wife. Then everyone else.
The fewer levels of decision maker there are between you and the head honcho, the better your job effectiveness will be. Make the other partners and/or PA’s understand this key point: in any big corporate operation, the head of marketing or PR has a hotline to the chair. Finito. If you don’t believe me, ring Telstra, Ford or anybody else with a household name.
Speed up decision making
Marketers from FMCG etc. that go into marketing professional services generally don’t last long, they get frustrated with the slowness of the decision making. If you want to hang around, change their system for making decisions –instigate say an email voting system for partners on critical issues, or insist on 20 minutes for marketing decisions at every board meeting…
Foster competition
Not enough firms of any discipline recognize they are competing with other firms in the same game for work. They spend their time being gentlemen and expect the work to just roll in the door through serendipity. If you can get facts and figures on profitability, hours worked by partners, rates, holiday stints, cars driven, I don’t care what, shove these figures into reports the partners will read. Make them jealous. You will get the budgets you have wanted after a few months of them recognizing they are not exactly number one. Ie. “All the partners at JBG get a $50,000 pa car allowance. They all drive Mercedes 500’s or Bentleys. Our’s is only $10,000, so our cars are Volvos or 3 series BMW’s. I’m not sure if that makes them look more successful, guys, what do you think?”
Manipulate HR
Make mates with the head of HR and adjust the culture at hiring stage.
“There is a big difference between the personality of a marketer and the personality of a lawyer or an accountant. One of the major challenges for HR is to recruit lawyers and accountants with people skills and the ability to promote the brand and the company. Juniors who go for key positions in my firm now, just won’t get the job if they aren’t sociable and exciting.” Accounting firm’s Business Development Officer.
Prove R.O.I.
All marketing organizations, I don’t care what business model you look at, have to justify their budgets by return on investment. It’s quite hard to do when all the real money has gone on lunches. But when you can show that a brochure sent out has received so many calls, you’ll get the budget to do something similar again. Remember, if you can’t measure it, it’s very hard to justify to an engineer or an accountant… Many partners will believe you have to have experience in their industry to be useful… it’s actually part of your job spec to prove them wrong.
Get hold of powerful information
The main difference between marketing professional services and non-professional services is that non-professional services can go into Myers and say “this is what our competition are selling, this is their price, and this is how are they doing it”. Professional service marketers have very few ways to track/measure competitors behavior.
Do great design
One thing everyone (even engineers) recognize is beauty and/or nifty design. In this sphere you can really shine – stunning direct mail or out bound emails, brochures, witty Xmas cards. Better looking power points. Intelligently crafted podiums for speeches. Great displays at conferences. If you must do lunches, make the menus gorgeous, the food superb, the speeches short and witty (write them for the partners, please) and the flowers stunning.
Be social
There are many people in similar roles to you who are also frustrated, but talented. Get together with them and compare notes. My thoughts above are nothing on what you’ll get from regular contact with your peers.
Ask yourself, how can I make my role centre stage?
Marketing needs to be at the core of any business for that business to be successful. A focus on customer needs, service delivery etc. would be a complete turnaround for most professional organizations. Let’s face it, if you’re dealing with clients in a superior ‘trust me’ manner, it’s hard to then turn around and say ‘hey, what is it you really want from us?’ – that would take a degree of humility and sensitivity that I cannot imagine would be easy for the average senior partner to even get their head around, let alone do on a regular basis.
Protect your power base
Firms are very protective of their marketing information. You never know when lawyers are going to leave and take their clients with them. You therefore need to track performance and behavior regularly – track billing and financial systems, clients details, create and update reports on marketing activity, response, effectiveness and budgets. Hold onto control.
Hire your mates
There are still a large number of service firms that have no marketing professionals working for them. And those marketers in firms need support from fellow marketers. If you’re already in PSM, you can easily get your mates jobs in the business, then use them/you to give references for each other –“every time you jump jobs you’ll get about 20% increase in salary” PSM recruitment specialist. Think of it as a business model.
Professional Services Marketing needs help, but that’s what makes it an interesting challenge for a marketer, and isn’t that why you joined the vocation in the first place? You could have studied Law and been bored to death doing conveyancing like those dweebs downstairs?
Poor old newspapers. They are old fashioned. Flat. Smelly. Get old and crumpled in a day, like I usually feel. (Check the photo. Haven’t I aged since last month?)
People in agency land don’t want to work on Press. The art directors can’t read and the writers in agencies much prefer working on the web (you can ring your mum and tell her you’ve done a new web site, just go to www. wowlookatmemum.com.au) and they hate Press because it’s just not glamorous. More important still, it’s not felt to lead to writing TV ads, which is what every decent creative wants to do as a step towards a career in making movies.
The newspaper ought to be more popular. For hundreds of years Press was the main media for ads. It is a powerful medium for building brands. Your brain stores pictures very effectively in still format. So it’s more memorable. It’s probably the only media outside of the web (or direct mail) where you can give real detail to the punters. It can be targeted. It can be persuasive. It talks one-on-one. It’s a proven performer. But it takes real skill to do Press well. Skills that are dying in agency land faster than the credibility of the Office of the Governor General.
Below I try to list some of the most important of the hundreds of little rules you need to follow to make your press ads really work. Please read these next time your agency wants you to sign off on something you’re unsure about.
What’s Good Creative?
Know your take out
Ask what it is you actually want the punter to do by reading this ad. Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to feel nice about being ripped off? Do you want them to stop using water/children/their own cash? Get a concept that really works to achieve your aim.
Start at the top
Readers look at the pickie, then the headline, then if it intrigues, they read the body copy. Get the right shot. Don’t settle for a dumb headline. A headline that forces the reader to go into the body copy to have the questions raised by it answered, is critical. Go for a funny one if you can, but avoid the one that makes a joke out of the image but doesn’t relate to the product or promise. (ie. “get cracking” with a picture of a cracked egg, for a car sale?) There are many derivations of this approach. They never work because they don’t make sense. The pharmacy industry is sickeningly full of them. For a laugh, check out the AMA Journal for the work of their self-proclaimed ‘specialist’ agencies.
Negative Space
By letting people focus on the image or words by giving them space, you increase their relative importance. White works. So does lots of black. But usually not as much.
Logo
People read top left to bottom right. Fact. Let them see your logo last and they’ll remember it more. Logos should always be near the right-hand base line. Shove the phone number above the logo or below it if you want calls.
A long read makes for a quick sale
If you’ve got something to say and it’s pertinent and it might talk the punter into forking out, say it. Long copy sells it’s tits off, done well. It’s an opportunity to really work the theatre of the mind or at least to give people a lot more information than they normally get to make a decision. It takes brains, decent briefing and time to create great copy. Things frequently not available to the average agency writer. If you’ve got no real reason to buy your product or service over the next one, or you can’t think of one, use pretty graphics. But I warn you, few quickies are as memorable as a good long one.
Focus on the punter, not the people
People relate to a person like themselves. (for example, seems obvious, but make sure you use the same sex as your targets.) Ask yourself one question always. Would I respond to that?
Be Seen & Look Nice
Colour in black and white pages stands out. So does B&W in colour. Do anything to be different. Use colour especially if it’s food. Show it as a meal, not ingredients, use the best photographers you can afford and go into the heat-set colour section only. The colour is almost invariably of hideously poor quality anywhere else.
Together Everyone Achieves More
If you’re running TV or outdoor, make them work together, by typeface, promise or the same or a related ad.
Typesetting
Is a dying art. Avoid widows (hanging words at the end of a paragraph). Avoid stretched sentences or those that are squashed up. Never assume that a look that is ‘fashionable’ like words running over other words, will work for you. It don’t. Usually they just make things harder to read. And the art directors feel good about themselves that they are keeping pace with fashion. The rule is, if it looks like someone else’s ad, then it won’t work well for you. You must stand out. You must have your own look.
Use a typeface that is not used by everyone else. (How many times do I have to say it? And they still set stuff in Helvetica.) Set your stuff where possible in serif type. That’s the type with curly bits on the end they use in books. People’s eyes fill in the gaps and it boosts readership. That’s assuming you’ve got copy worth reading.
Kerning is the space between the words and letters. It’s often a very fine balancing act. Correct kerning makes words much more readable.
Leading (taken from the lead metal which type was originally moulded from) is the space between the lines. More leading makes it easier to read, as it gives each line importance. Too much leading can make it hard for the eye to tie it together.
It’s a balancing act. That’s what I mean by art.
Picture This
Hardly anyone uses illustrations any more. It’s a shame. But they take time. You have to brief someone. You can’t just find them easily on a CD. (I realise you can find anything on a CD, but something that really works for your job/brand is hard.) As they are the result of a person’s imagination, and not simply an interpretation of fact, which photographs are, they have many more possibilities. Unfortunately illustrations can also be expensive, but are well worth considering.
Photography. Shoot your own when you can. You get ownership. You get the real McCoy and you don’t get that really dumb ‘stock shot’ look (capped teeth, perfect, out-of-date hair styles and prozac induced expressions) which people cringe from.
KISS
There is nothing sadder than a desperate ad that has everything that might possibly talk a punter into buying something in the ad. It smacks of a lack of discipline and thought. You are only saying that you don’t know what it is you really need to say. The punters eyes glaze over and they move on. They don’t give a hoot if you waste your money. They are reading for the sake of entertainment and education. They want a simple, clever message, regardless of what you think they need to know. Give them a simple ad.
Which News Is Less Limited?
Local Newspaper
Weeklies that are delivered free to people’s homes are great for real estate, for small retailers who can’t afford bigger ads, and for targeting specific readers like owners of big houses in Hawthorn or Double Bay. They are basically delivered along the lines of local council areas. There’s a few like The Melbourne Weekly and equivalents which are delivered across much wider areas, their maps and all other rate & material details are available from their reps. Locals are usually quite cost-effective on a cost per thousand basis.
Locals are easier to get editorial in if it’s handled with diplomacy and the story has a relevant local angle. They are also easy to stand out in, as the competing ads are almost always ugly and dumb (done by the paper’s staff, who’d be working in an agency if they could write or typeset a decent ad) Readership is oriented to older females.
To really have an impact in a key area, buy a whole page in the local if you can afford it. Or if you’d like to be in regularly, and I do recommend that, buy a series of cute little ads (say 10 cm x 2 col or even smaller) in the middle of the tradesmen section or what ever is relevant to your product/service. (Why is it the banks don’t buy more ads in the real estate section? When is it you would consider a bank more than when you are wondering if /how you can afford the 2 acre cottage in Toorak or Point Piper?).
Dailies
The big guns of the press world. Can hit millions in a day. Can be bloody expensive at $99.00 a column centimetre (Is that really the Herald Sun casual rate this week?). Works well with TV. Editorial staff think they are above manipulation by clients. That’s why you type ‘Media Release’ on the top of the page.
There’s a million ways you can buy. Try small regular ads. Or medium sized, say half page, punchy ads. Or Double Page Spreads if you afford them. One good DPS is often more effective than a serious TV campaign. At a fraction of the cost.
You have a myriad of options for shape too, so don’t settle for a simple format because it’s easier for the paper. Your main fight about the size and shape you want is with editorial. This is because the journalists, who, although unqualified for it, decide how things should look and they hate the reps (It’s a class thing hanging over from another century. The journos think they are honest, left-wing intellectuals dirtying their hands while working for a robber baron, the reps think they are well-bred business professionals working for an ‘entrepreneur’, hampered by left wing radicals. The poor journalists are caught in all sorts of little contradictions. While feeling sure they shouldn’t discriminate, they are convinced they are more important than TV journos who aren’t really to be taken seriously because hey, they got the job on their looks.) so there’s absolutely no cooperation between the Journos and the reps. Which makes it hard to do the sort of juicy joint deals with editorial that the TV stations can organise so easily.
Nationals
There’s only a few; The Australian, The Fin Rev. Ads are rarely relevant to most readers. But then again, when are they? Good for hitting company directors and frequent flyers. Nice vehicle if you need to impress your board. Many is the ad run with this in mind.
Daily Freebies
The young darlings of the press world, MX and equivalents take style from the give aways you find in coffee bars which have run band & venue’s ads for years. They are a more groovy environment, but the principles remain exactly the same. Have an idea. Say it in a unique way. Use a typeface that stands out….
Cost Per Person
The newspaper will give you all sorts of stuff about who they reckon reads their rags. (Their newspaper amazingly always looks like the best deal. Until you look at the other guys stats.) Work out what percentage of their readership are your targets, then compare that against the opposing papers for your cost-per-reader. Buy the most cost effective. Explain to the reps this is what you are doing. I’m always thrilled how a little competition goes a long way with a commission-based person.
Space for Sale
You buy press by the area. Column centimetres. Columns being the verticals of type they typically break articles into, centimetres being the height of the columns. They add a ‘loading’ for exact location, right-hand page, more read spots like inside front, back or centre spread. They are often worth the extra money as they get much better readership, but try not to pay quite the loading they ask.
Buy Your Environment
The flavour or environment of a paper (or a section within it) creates an expectation in the readers mind. Seek a fit with the environment. ‘Lifestyle’ if you’re in homewares, ‘Body & Soul’ if you’re in pharmacy etc. Don’t just buy a rag because it’s cheap. It may make you look that way too.
A Drip Beats a Flood
It’s like a garden that gets regular watering. Even tiny little ads placed often will do better than a large ad placed rarely. But be consistent in location within the paper. Frequency of location buys you credibility. And if they have seen an ad often enough, people recall it.
Escape to an Island
Grabbing a space right smack in the middle of a big slab of type works. The middle of the stock market report in the Financial Review is a nice buy. If your product relates to singles or is just ‘sexy’, like a new car, try an island ad in the most read part of the local papers, the ‘Connections’ section ie. ‘Male seeking Female’ etc.
Do a Strip For Me
A strip along the bottom of the newspaper page is read more. I don’t know why. But it’s usually easy to get inserted as all they have to do is raise the other ads up a touch.
Jab, jab, jab, PUNCH
Running an ad that develops over 3 or 4 consecutive Right-Hand pages works to build up expectation.
Place Your Hand Right
Ads placed on this side of the page outsell ones placed on the left. I think it’s because when we use a bound ruled pad we usually only write on the right-hand side.
Never Agree to Contracts
Media barons like contracts because it locks you into a long term commitment to them, which means the money goes to them and not to another media. This serves no-one but them. You don’t get a better deal. Sure, 10% off sounds great. But you’ll get that on almost every deal and they’ll try harder if they haven’t got your business, than if they already have.
Distressed is Best
If you want an ad placed cheaply, ring up a few hours before deadline. Even if your agency charges you a fortune to make up the ad in only a few hours, you’re still way better off to buy distressed space than to pay the normal rate.
Tell Your Rep to Take it Off
As the public spends more time looking at pretty pictures on TV and the web and less time reading books, Press will become increasingly less relevant and isolated. Given that it’s unfashionable, but still a very powerful tool, you can use this unpopularity to get a better deal. Ask for one. Then ask again.
What’s Press good for anyway?
You should use Press to launch, if you’ve got a lot of detail to convey. You should use it to support TV when you can’t afford to flight TV ads constantly and you should use it as reminders for retail specials, sales etc. and to work hand-in-hand with Radio; Press providing the vital visual component.
What’s UnimPressive?
Attitude. With only two major players across the whole spectrum of locals, dailies etc., they are complacent. They have out-dated systems for dealing with customers, for handling artwork (try emailing something to the dailies! Any magazine can accept pdf’s, but not them) for settling accounts and worst, they are stuck in a class war (journo’s vs. reps) the rest of the country moved on from years ago. They don’t try to improve things because there ain’t no real competition. And they’re run by rich old men who don’t see a need to do anything new.
There he is, same gravely voice, same jokes, same ‘I know what I’m doing, I’m a radio star’, that I’ve been listening to since I was a teenager. Which is a frickin long time, let me tell you. And there I go again, hitting ‘roam/seek’ on the car radio, desperately trying to avoid him. To find something different and interesting.
I’ve just got this new car. A once in a decade experience for me. During the process, which was dragged out more than John Howard’s Prime Ministership, I was given a loan car for a month. Unfortunately the mechanics who provided the loan car, and then the new car, both times felt I needed to listen to the music they listen to. And as it’s got computer everything, I can’t yet work out how to change the settings on the car radio, (which is a screen with orange letters and a ‘menu’) so I’m still stuck with the stations they chose.
For over a month I’ve been listening to stuff I wouldn’t normally listen to. A learning experience you think? Good for my soul? I’ve been to each and every station they programmed in for hours at a time. I’ve learnt only one thing. That as much as the radio industry harps on about being fresh and doing new and exciting things, it’s all the damn same.
The radio man culture has soaked through the radio carpet like spilled cheap red wine, giving everything a tatty brown hue and a sweet, smelly old man alcoholic vibe. This happens when people appoint from within any industry and only swap jobs in that industry, because you need ‘relevant experience’ – much like adland. In adland, when they’ve worked at Clemengers, Patts and Mojo, and all their cohorts have worked at the same places, they are indoctrinated with ‘adland’ culture – they don’t learn from other industries and the whole business itself becomes dry and lacks innovation.
Now I don’t blame radio technology. I understand you can only have so many stations on the AM and FM bands and each little slice of the airwave pie is worth X millions for its potential audience. It’s what they send down the airwaves that depresses me. I challenge you to define the difference between FOX, MMM, NOVA, MIX and their numerous equivalents across the country. Just as there’s no psychological difference between the letters 4KQ, 4BH, 4BC and 4RN, there’s bugger all difference between their formats and their whole marketing act. And a marketing act is all it is.
Far be it for a writer in the esteemed Marketing Magazine to bag marketing, but as any Jesuit Priest or Tibetan Monk will tell you, marketing is all just bullshit unless you have reasonable differences in other aspects of the product offered. If it’s just spin, it’s just bunkem. The radio stations all do live crosses. They all do cash offers to ring. They all have people who are funny with working class accents on their breakfast shows. They all have reps with deep voices who are paid on commission with last year’s haircut and they all talk abut their ‘market research’ and their ‘stars’ like they believe it.
And they all sound the same. I’d rather listen to one of the public stations jabbering on in Somalian or whatever it is for a minute or so, because when they do play music, it’s bloody sensational.
To put it into a harsher perspective, none of the kids in my office listen to radio unless forced to. (And they buy radio spots, remember.) They and their mates all laugh about Australian radio. They laugh about the people on the stations, the ads and the suburban, goody-two-shoes values of the ‘stars’. They laugh about how bad the music is. They download music from God-knows-where, play it loud in the creative department and it’s nothing like what I’ve been listening to for over a month.
Radio stations are out of touch in many different aspects of their operation. They are followers of culture, not leaders. They are dragging their whole industry down the gurgler. No wonder we and the rest of the marketing community in OZ would rather put money into fridge magnets or web banners in Sweden than give them buys. Their product is shit. Wall to wall clichés with a yawn on top. If an industry does not re-invent itself, it goes the way of the railways – once the world’s key transport industry, now just shunting coal and taking snotty kids to school.
Radio promises several fantastic elements to professional marketers – closeness to retail action. (you hit them in the car – while on the way to shopping). Cheap production (you can do lots of ads for a few thousand) speed of delivery (you can literally get an ad to air in minutes), well-sliced segmentation (you can POTENTIALLY hit different psychological /demographic groups with different messages at different times) you can buy nationally without too much mucking around and you can work in closely with the medium to underscore your relationship with the station they feel loyal to – bonding with the audience, via live crosses, contests, sponsorships, web links etc. And you can get high rates of frequency relatively cost effectively.
But does it deliver? They bleat about variety, about cutting edge, about driving the music industry and they fall short on most of them. They are instead run by the major record companies and the major media houses like Seven or Nine for the benefit of their collective businesses, not the good of our people.
Which is not to say I don’t like using radio. Radio is a tool like any other in our marketer’s media tool box. It’s just that it’s rusty and smells and I’d like to buy a new one at Bunnings if I could.
I blame old, lazy management, entrenched, out of date selling systems, and a lack of respect for marketing itself. Their marketing departments are only there to serve the sales department. They have absolutely no impact on the product offering, or any training in marketing. Have any of them had experience in the marketing department of major companies? Do any of them have marketing qualifications? Do any of them conduct real, accurate, objective research studies on brand personality or strategic options for growth for their media or heaven forbid, their clients?
Why do I care?
Because it’s one aspect of the media which should reflect Australian society. Because we actually hear our own people talking to us – but it could be done so much better. It could really be a mirror to us as a people – giving hope to those of us who think we’re already just another state of Bushed America.
One stand-out exception is the western suburb late night show on Nova in Melbourne, with the Lebbo live crosses. The accents are almost spot on, the burn-outs sound real. I can smell the souvs and the hair gel.
I also like almost anything on News Radio, and Macca on a Sunday morning, which reminds me there is still out there an Australia, with real Australians in it. Even the sport on 774 is done with better humour and more dignity. What would a Sunday afternoon at the beach be like without Cricket on the ABC? And I’m not alone. The top 10% by influence and income in this country almost exclusively listen to ABC stations, but as we can’t buy spots, it seems pointless dwelling on them, the AB demographic.
Commercial radio can influence our lives, help us understand the world around us and, what we’re here to do, can help good marketers manipulate the hell out of their target markets. But that’s what it could do. Not what it does most of the time. All I see it doing is selling airtime at discounted rates, hoping to make its monthly sales budget, before the accountants pull the pin and put another light-brained, over-tired sales person into the position of manager.
Do we buy it?
Of course. Like we buy bread and water. Given that we do all buy radio airwaves, the question is, how to?
It’s about time
Radio airtime is gone in a jack flash. It’s worth zip after it’s gone, so they will discount to move spots that are not sold. If they know you’re good for a few spots when the chips are down, but only at a price, you’ll get the calls and get cheap spots.
Negotiate Contracts
Radio reps are happier with certainty and will discount to buggery and thus lose profits for their owners, just for some guaranteed sales. This is a beautiful thing to keep in mind. I have clients who consistently buy at levels that are fractions of published prices.
Buy packages
The thinly spread ‘brand-builder’ packages are in themselves, too light to do anybody any good, but if you buy a few of them, knowing you’ll need spots later in the year, they are often very cheap airtime.
Bonuses versus value
Oh please, they don’t discount prices, but just give us bonuses? I ask you, is it just cynical me, or is it a paper thin charade?
Buy across the franchise
The stations all have their little franchise in each city – a red-neck talk-back, a MIX/variety, a GOLDen hits, a geriatric soft music. If you buy across the group, you can get better rates and you don’t have to change your creative to fit the various formats, like you’d probably want to if you had bought into a Talk-Back chain and a couple of 20-30 year old hits stations.
Buy a variety of lengths
The reason you are always being sold 30 second ads is, as I’ve mentioned before, because the radio industry is still living in the dark ages and are as flexible as a steel RSJ. (Which is what you build bridges out of.) So almost all ads are 30 seconds, cause hey, that’s what they sell. If you insist, and I do mean jump up and down, ring the sales manager and call his mother nasty names, they’ll run 45’s or 60’s or even 120 seconders. Given OK creative, because you’ve got the audience for a tad longer, they are extremely effective.
Buy drive
All cars have radios and most people listen to one station or another when they drive, if they don’t have their i-pods on or are on the phone. I have to imagine, dare I, that the main political lobbyists for ‘safety’ on roads by not allowing car phone use, is the radio stations, who see their audience declining and thus see revenue following suit. Fact is, best time to buy radio is when most people are listening (economies of scale) so morning or evening, Drive it is.
Buy lunch
Lunch is drive in the middle of the day. People going to get lunch, drive there. People in factory cafés listen to the radio.
Buy off-peak
But only if it is incredibly cheap. Say if prime drive is normally worth $500 a spot, off peak on the same station’s probably worth about $50, if you’re getting a good deal.
Avoid Loyalty
Radio stations enjoy loyalty from listeners. You are a MMM girl (God help you) or a JJJ girl (you’ve got some taste, all be it for the strange). Each station might only get 8% of the total listeners in that demographic. By definition this means if your buy is only one or two stations, you only hit a tiny percentage of your potential market, the 8%, possibly too often. You’re better to spread your buy across several stations fairly regularly to really work a market. For women, 30-50, say 2-3 weeks on Mix, 2-3 weeks on Gold, 2-3 weeks on MMM, 2-3 weeks on MP, same on AW, back to Mix etc.
Buy less frequency/more frequency
Than what they want to sell you. Radio stations will often over-sell a bunny client (lots of off-peak time – the few who do listen at that time will be bored to death). Conversely, they will also sell a client a hopelessly weak campaign laughingly referred to as a ‘brand builder’ because that’s exactly what it doesn’t do (as the Dromana Council re-named Shark Bay as Safety Beach in the 1930’s). An ad once every few days will do absolutely nothing for any brand.
Buy tops and tails
Like with TV, the most effective ads are at the start and end of breaks. It’s best to buy both, guaranteeing a much more powerful frequency effect. But best with a ten second tail that just repeats the main message and the phone number or locations etc. – especially after the news bulletin.
How many ads a week?
A good balance is the classic 30 x 30 seconders a week, if you’re running across a wide range of time slots. If you’re just buying drive, say 20 spots a week, two in the morning and two in the afternoon 5 days a week, will usually work very well.
For retail, know when your customers are more likely to buy then buy in those and the previous two to three days only.
What should those ads be like? – Creative
Radio ads work in the theatre of the mind. If you can paint a picture of a situation or have them see your spokesperson, in their mind’s eye, chatting to them like a friend, then you have their attention.
Never use ‘radio’ voices
You must have your ads sound unlike other ads. If you are sound wallpaper, you’re wasting much of your media dollar because the punters won’t take it in.
Don’t have them write/produce stuff
I’m not saying they do a bad job on purpose, that would be assuming they knew the difference. Their writers and producers try to do an OK job, but if you make 50 ads a day, how good can the 47th be? Radio ads made by the stations are thus like a production line of brown cardboard boxes, one after the other is made exactly the same, and it often goes out of the factory never to be heard from again.
Be funny
Radio is a media that you turn on for two reasons, you need information – ie. the weather. Or you need entertainment/company. Be the amusement and they’ll love you. Be serious and they’ll hate you. Unless you’re very serious and it’s bloody important and you’re doing something about it.
Innuendos and metaphors are great way to be different; a nice play on words will go a long way. Make it sexy, make it funny, make it nasty, but please…most of all…make it different.
Build a brand
Be consistent with your voices and your music bed, if you can. Or at least your scenarios should be of the same ilk. Ensure your key messages are maintained. If you’re unsure they’re getting it, do some research on the messages – almost no-one does focus groups on radio, which is plain weird. Shopping centre studies are good too. You can get them to sit down, have a cup of tea and listen to 2-3 ads in a couple of minutes and get 00’s of people’s comments in a day or so. Adding statistical certainty for similar time/money, compared to a couple of focus groups.
Build up a story
The best brands grow like trees with branches of personality not all going in the same direction. A series of ads should create a depth of brand personality. Telstra is doing this very well at the moment with Bigpond’s ‘Dad and Kid about the Great China Wall’ story. But I’m not sure if they’re carrying that TV campaign through to radio.
The boring bits
Always work out a plan in advance and keep to it. (Radio reps smell a dollar and think it’s 50.) Always mention the phone number more than once. Always use your tagline or a twist on it. Always buy drive or lunch. Work with the stations on connected promos.
I’ve been a bit nasty above, and I’m sure there’s lots of good people in radio land, but after 20 years of buying radio regularly for clients, from commercial stations and public broadcasters, having conducted hundreds of campaigns on radio, I’m left with an overwhelming sense of depression about the lack of movement in the industry and a distrust of management except with Andrew Baxter of SEN, and Kylie Sarrinsen of AW.
You’re at the supermarket. You’re in a rush. You find yourself in front of three packs of something you don’t often get. They are around the same price. Which one do you choose? The groovy one? The cheap looking one? The one that looks like it will taste the best?
Packaging design is for this purpose alone: To make sure the wavering finger stops on your product.
It’s not for winning packaging awards (although there’s ample evidence to suggest that award winners are better sellers) and not for saving money – the public treats companies who ‘save money’ like people who don’t shower.
No one buys ugly
Your packaging, whether it’s for a tooth paste, a lipstick or a battery, makes a huge impact on how easy it is to sell your product. It’s the marketing foundation stone. If you don’t get the packaging right, the amount of money you have to spend on other elements of the mix is way higher.
Good packaging outsells bad packaging hugely – it’s the last thing your customers see and often the only thing that really sells them to the punter. It hangs around in their pantry, their living room or their garage, driving your business every moment of it’s often long life. Think of it like art. Art that keeps you in a job.
There’s so little to look at, really. So little to sell you on one or the other. And so many dumb things holding back other wise, great products. Why did it take 80 years and countless scenes of kids getting covered in tomato sauce by dad’s trying to knock the last couple of drops out, before they made the squeezable sauce bottle? How smart do you have to be?
Don’t mess with my brand
It’s not that people didn’t have the idea for a better sauce bottle. It’s that brand managers and marketing managers are petrified of changing packaging. They are of the belief that any change may stop some 1 or 2 percent of punters from recognising the brand and buying the product. They usually negate all the good reasons to up-date and the many more potential customers a more user-friendly or more stand-out pack may attract. They are holding their companies back.
Sure, protect the brand. Brief for the brand’s core elements to remain. Be serious about it. Then let talented people do the thing you’re employing them to do; give you great stuff. Have some guts.
How to do better Packaging
The brand is the asset
What your shareholders will be selling for a bill or two one day will be the brand. It will be worth money because it generates sales as if by magic. This is because people trust it and that means they’ve tried it, it’s worked (none of which I can have any influence over) and surprise surprise, they recognise it. That’s the important bit. It means you need to have a BLOODY BIG BRAND they can see from the other side of the super market or Shell Shop aisle.
Stand out in a supermarket
The store is a very busy place. Your eye does not know what to look at. Everything is screaming at you. Like the butcher’s spuiker at the market, you have no choice but to scream louder. Use colours. Contrasting or mixing in, bold and bright or blacks and whites. Do drop shadows behind the product name, or do clean & simple to stand out from other cluttered designs. There’s lots of tricks your designers ought to know about.
Check that it stands out
Take the roughs/mock-ups down the local supermarket, put them up against the competition, and have a good look. Take a photo so you can show the rest of the team. Watch out for the manager of the store. You could ask first, but most of the time they’ll say no.
Maximise your space
You’ve often only got a few centimetres wide and high on the shelf that you can feasibly use. Use it all if you can. The more visual space you can use, the more impact you can have on the punters. Grab more space by adjusting the angles so you can see it from the side, or keeping a colour consistent so the packs connect together. And make sure that the colour variants work together as a series, or a bigger image.
Little Things make a big difference
More modern typefaces can update a design with hardly any other changes. Just moving the barcode around so the front has a bit less clutter can also help.
Pandora’s Box
Please consider packaging that’s friendly to the environment. I know you’re groaning, but the concerns of the public are genuine and it’s your grandchildren who won’t be able to fish, breathe or procreate, so grow up and do something decent for the planet. One time bomb is pseudo estrogens; which occur in margarine tubs, drink bottles etc. and leach into the food. Banned in many countries, as I understand it. Ask your production manager what alternatives you have before someone picks it up in the media and you have to change. Or change first then steal the market share of your competitors with a nasty little leak to your mate at the TV station.
Check with Standards Australia
Make sure you meet the legal guidelines, which are very tight on the size of type, what it says etc. List the ingredients by volume etc. Do the right thing before you have to. It’s damn silly having $30,000 worth of packaging in your warehouse you can’t use, reminding the M.D. daily why you don’t deserve a pay rise.
Older customers need bigger type
The population is ageing. The designers are young, and hip. They like tiny type. Anyone over 40 (almost half of us?) can’t read it. You figure.
Long copy works
Tell them more when you can. If you’ve got a nice big canvas like a cereal box, go to town on the detail. You never know when they are going to read it and like this mag, if it’s in print they believe it.
Cross Sell
Why is it so few marketing managers have worked out that their products can help sell each other? Making an antipasto? You’ll need our green olives too….etc.
Add extra bits and pieces
You’re often in their home for a month or two. They open the pantry. They stare at the packs wondering what to make tonight. Now’s your chance. Give them a bit of a read. You can do big stickers, little flyers, inside packs or as slips over the pack.
Drop the numbers
No one wants to eat numbers. People actively don’t buy foods with lots of them on the side. Watch them in the supermarket if you don’t believe me. Spell out the ingredient if it sounds OK. If it sounds suss, change the fucking recipe. If you wouldn’t eat it, why should they?
Tell them the real ingredients
‘Spices’ is better expressed as ‘garlic, ginger, cinnamon, chilli, pepper’. ‘Meat’ is better expressed as ‘lean pork’ or ‘free range chicken’. Listed as ingredients for a recipe, they sound appetising. As ‘colours’ or ‘flavours’, they sound deadly.
Make it easier
The customer doesn’t have enough time to breathe, let alone stuff around with a can opener or to find a bloody pair of scissors. Recognise this and you’ll do us all a favour. I don’t care if the other bastards in your industry do it that way too, it’s your business and your customers I’m concerned about. Help them and they will love you. Make it hard and they’ll only buy it once.
Show them the product – see through packs
If it doesn’t look like bird shit in the pack, let them see it. If that’s what they are looking for, give it to them. It makes their life and your sales easier.
Use Black
While they may vary a touch in fashion ability, the thing about colours is that their psychological effects stay pretty similar for decades. Blue’s good for bathroom things. Green some how means ‘natural’. Black may be very popular; to an extent that you’d have to wonder if you won’t stand out, but it makes things seem better quality.
Show it ready to eat
Uncooked does nothing to sell product. If you show it on a plate, as a meal, it sells. Amazing.
Break the mould
If all the products in a market use particular colours or come in certain sizes, unless it’s dramatically impractical, you’re much better to do something different. Why is it almost all cereal packs have a bowl with strawberries on the crushed bird food and milk pouring into it? How dumb do they think we are? They have to tell us how it’s eaten? What do they think we were going to buy it for? Fertiliser?
Use full-colour
I know you’ll have trouble believing it, but there are still some packs in consumer ville’s supermarkets in one or two colours only. They look like they were designed by a dentist on his home PC. They sell as badly. Unless it’s a home brand you want to position as the cheapest on the market, use full colour.
When in doubt, make it beautiful
This is a standard practice in my business. If you haven’t had a good idea, and you’re out of time, you take something beautiful and wrap the thing in it. This will work on 80% of you clients. And often works on the public too. It’s better if the concept has something to do with the product, but I’ve seen a naked woman selling brake linings. Must be something strange about that particular target market.
Choose your ‘Designers’ on looks
Anyone who wears black, particularly a turtle-neck with blonde highlights, should be stabbed with a blunt knife in the eyes, as they obviously don’t use them. How could you stare at the mirror in the morning and say, “Gee, I’m happy going to work looking like everyone else in the office.” And then have the cheek tell a client you’re creative? Check out the staff at Cato’s or call AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association) for your local design firm, if you want a laugh.
Ditto for their work, which if it copies other packs they have seen lately (ie. small san serif type, lots of white, no details – cause they can’t write etc.) they are committing the worst sin possible for packaging. The public hates copy cats. Designers, who follow fashion the way you’d follow money blowing in the wind, call this ‘derivative’ meaning ‘derived from someone else’s’ – they can’t even say the word copying.
Don’t try to be funny
It’s very rare that successful high volume packaging is funny, even though funny ads in TV, Print or whatever are almost always more successful. I think it’s because the first time you read something it’s funny, but by the time you’ve read it a few times it isn’t anymore. Try reading this article 5 or 6 times.
How to buy packaging
Get on with your life
As mentioned above, there’s this hopeless fear of loss of market share that surrounds the decision to move on with packaging. A change in packaging, and ‘wastefully’ biffing the last 30,000 packs, is better than keeping/using the old stock. The old stock doesn’t do its job right. Get rid of it.
Take it a step at a time
If you are a bit chicken, like most of the big corporates, you can make two or three ‘generational’ changes over a year or so. The market research says you ought to be here, but it’s a big leap from where you are. You ask your designers to make up two or three versions, that slowly move your product over, so you’ve got far less chance of loosing any loyalists along the way.
Fit your positioning
Choose the expensive look, when your product is. Choose the cheapest only if it fits the brand personality. Confirm the brand promise, please. Fit the dream. If they want to loose weight eating this, make the pack tall and slim. If you want them to think it’s ‘Asian’ give them a pack that looks like it came from a noodle shop.
Buy ideas, not finished art
I’d rather see a concept scribbled on the back of an envelope than a really nicely worked up, dumb idea, presented as a fait accompli. I hope you’re more interested in content than polish too. I’ve often seen people buy a finished look because they felt guilty the designers went to all the trouble of printing the thing out and sticking it onto the box. Big deal. It won’t sell better than a good idea presented badly, that you know will improve with a bit of work. Don’t be conned by presentation. It’s a law in my business that if you think the client has no brains, you present finished work. If you think they are fairly in-tune with things, you give them a few decent ideas; it’s a piece of piss to make them look nice. But it’s hard to have that good idea in the first place. (Especially if you’re a designer who still thinks black is in.)
Brief 2-4 designers
Don’t assume you have to be loyal at this end of the spectrum. Ask them to show roughs only and choose them on concepts alone. Show them the cheapest price you were quoted and ask them to get as close as they can.
Get them to make a mock-up
All the printers will knock up a pack for you, if you promise them there’s a job in it. It’s standard procedure. So it’s not hard for the designers to do it. And please test it in store.
Show the boss
Take the ideas as roughs to Coles or Woolies or Auto Barn or whomever is your main customer. Get their input. Recognise they have loyalties to whoever is the biggest player, so don’t promise you’ll do everything they suggest. Use an excuse like “Our Chair person has the last say.”
Market Research it ‘in-situ’
Having spent the odd decade or two in market research, let me be frank. Most of my fellow researchers will sell you a very ‘safe’ series of focus groups and you’ll come out with the copy-cat cereal pack problem I mentioned above. That’s because respondents think it sounds sensible to show the milk pouring onto the bowlful of crispy flakes when they are sitting around a board room table. It’s only when they are confronted by thousands of products in the supermarket do they click, then say, “Well you ought to do it differently.” Never do focus groups on packaging in a nice warm room. Do it at the cold noisy supermarket and you’ll get useful information. It’s a touch harder for the researcher, but at $10-20,000 for the exercise, they can bloody well earn it.
Print Off-shore
Go into an Asian food shop and look at the packaging of chips, drinks etc. It’s gravure. It’s gorgeous. It sells wonderfully. It’s also much cheaper per unit. Yes, you might need to order a few more, to reach their minimums, but heck, why muck around with poorer quality that doesn’t sell so well, just because you can’t get the slack producers in Australia to do a better job?