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Whoa! What’s that squiggly square? And why is it on your ad?

Posted on: March 12th, 2011 by Bone Admin 1 Comment

What’s that squiggly square you see on real estate signs, billboards, magazine ads and even business cards these days? And what are you supposed to do with it?  Two questions that the majority of Canadian consumers have when they spot one.

They’re called “QR codes” and they’re the latest trend to help connect the offline world to the online world.  If you haven’t seen one yet, you just did (above).  And if you haven’t checked one out yet, you may want to try it out.  If for no other reason to at least be ‘in the know’ if someone asks you about them. (more…)

Do as I do… not as I say I will do.

Posted on: October 10th, 2010 by Bone Admin

Accurate predictions of buying behavior would be possible if you could get customers and prospects to state their honest attitudes. But unfortunately in customer surveys, stated attitude is often not their honest attitude – the one that they will base their buying behavior on. (How else could you possibly explain New Coke?)

Even in focus groups, people generally don’t say what they really think; they say what they believe the moderator wants to hear. They will be “politically correct” but not necessarily truthful. For example, focus group participants faced with the choice of one lottery game offering 10 prizes of $1 million and another offering one prize of $10 million will usually choose the one with the 10 prizes. As any lottery insider can tell you, the most popular game will always be the one offering one prize of $10 million. When shelling out real money, the buyers react quite differently from what they say they will do in a focus group.

You have probably been in situations where a prospect says they want to buy, but when the moment came to write the cheque or sign the paperwork, your calls were never returned. When it comes to making buying decisions, people don’t always do what they say they’ll do. So keep this in mind when you do market research and product surveys.

Marketing budget cuts gone beyond scratches and bruises?

Posted on: September 29th, 2010 by Bone Admin 1 Comment

When a marketing team is looking for costs to cut, the main objective is usually to save costs without cutting programs. After all, who wants to admit that something that they’ve been working on for months (or maybe even years) is expendable?

As it was written in the old Monty Python movie “the Holy Grail”, last week I reviewed five items to look for that would cause “just a scratch”, not even a flesh wound.

1. Second page letterhead
2. Obsolete inventory
3. Postal rate optimization (by envelope standardization)
4. Hide the color copier
5. Management reports online instead of in print.

These five items impact no programs, no jobs and no customers. The brand is intact.  Just some internal egos to bruise.  Now… on to the next step – the minor flesh wounds.

Folders.  The cost of a pocketed folder can range from 50 cents to $5.00 depending on the production values that are included in the design specifications (and how many are produced).  When a major product launch is being contemplated, the urge of the product team is usually to create a carrier to evidence all of their hard work.  Price sheets, brochures, FAQs, buck slips, newsletters, or even a prospectus or offering memorandum can all be “displayed” in a weighty package.  However! Would an envelope suffice? Will the sales team dismantle the package immediately and use only the parts they like?  If there is a corporate folder, would that do the trick just as effectively?  Keep in mind that the folder is often an ego-driven byproduct and not particularly useful to build anything more than cost overruns.

Die cuts. While I’m on the subject of print production, those little “slits” you find in brochures that conveniently house the corners of a business card can easily be abolished. A staple works better and makes sure the card doesn’t fall out or get lost.  Again, no impact on the quality or substance of the brochure… just the cost.

Yellow pages advertising. With multiple categories available to just about every business type, it’s hard to know where to stop the spending on your yellow pages account.  Which category deserves the full display ad versus the listing only?  Stop and consider your target market and whether the internet (i.e. Google) could reach your target audience just as effectively.  Especially with the advent of geo-based searches. The best kept internet secret of all is Google Places – which allows the business owner to include pictures, hours of operation, phone numbers, email addresses etc — for FREE.  Long and short of it – cut back yellow pages to the bare bones minimum. Go online.

Reduce frequency. If you’ve been faithfully producing a newsletter or other type of publication on a quarterly basis, you must ask yourself: would anyone be the wiser if you did one every four months instead of every three months?  In all, you could save 25% of the cost of that single program, and no one would notice.

Production values. I once worked for a company that won a “best design” award for a printed document. A lovely accolade, except for the fact that the document in question was a prospectus.  For those not close to the financial industry, the prospectus is the “legal-ese” document that must be provided at the point of sale.  It’s not part of making the sale… and is usually only brought out after the paperwork is signed.  The moral here is if you’re going to spend money on designers and print production values, make sure it’s on something that is customer-facing and will be used to make the sale, not support it after the fact.

Okay… that’s five flesh wounds.  These cuts go straight to a marketer’s pride, but they’re still not likely to inflict any material damage to careers or customer relationships.  And when the choice is to give up a program in one large artery-spilling coup, or to take five band-aids to a broader base, most marketers would still prefer the band-aids.

Clean, crisp content: the golden nugget in a digital world

Posted on: September 14th, 2010 by Bone Admin

golden treasureContent is the golden nugget in the digital world. No matter what the industry, company or cause, there’s huge unprecedented demand for relevant, value-add content. And search-friendly content that boosts your rank in search engines organically. Oh, and did I mention “free” content?

But like all things ‘golden’, content that meets the criteria is actually quite hard to come by. Most firms struggle to develop and deliver it. Evidence: the newsletter that is perpetually a noose around some junior staffer’s neck. The blog post that hasn’t been updated since February. The Twitter feed that contains a few retweets of sports scores. The idea is so simple. The execution is anything but for most companies.

How can you create and distribute a steady flow of stuff that your customers actually care about? Here are 9 ideas we use to bust the logjam and get the content flowing:

  1. Recycle. Your posts and tweets from a few months ago can be refreshed (new heads and call to action) and reposted. To those who missed it, it is new and fresh content. To those who saw it, it’s a reinforcement of your message.
  2. Repurpose. Drip email campaigns that you’ve created can become blog posts. Blog posts can become newsletter articles. Newsletter articles can become contributed content for magazines and community newspapers.
  3. Bundle. A series of blog posts on the same topic or theme can be packaged together and bundled as a presentation or ebook.  One of the best sellers in the 1980s was a book called “All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten” by American minister and author Robert Fulghum.  The title of the book is taken from the first essay in the volume, but in all the book contains 50 short essays ranging from 200 to 1000 words on topics ranging from surprises, holidays, childhood and death.  He acknowledged that the essays were written over many years to friends, family, parishioners and were never thought of as being bundled into a book.
  4. Go granular. It’s amazing how many steps, side processes and sidebars can be identified in any given process. Like peeling an onion, there’s always another layer deeper you can go.
  5. Go contrarian. For a change of pace, develop a list of “don’ts” instead of a list of “do’s”. Argue the left side of the issue instead of the right side of the issue (a great trick if you can still make the right side look right)
  6. Go personal. Whatever your topic, give a personal example in the form of a story.
  7. Entertain. A headline that entertains will draw in readers far greater than an academic headline, or one that reads like a table of contents. Be creative. Your readers have lots of choices for content. Your headline is your advertising as to why they should read yours.
  8. Rant. Nothing tells a story or gets a point of view across better than an example drawn from real life. Especially an example that will draw emotion for the readers.
  9. Interview experts. Q&A interviews with thought leaders, strategic partners, or flat-out interesting or creative thinkers makes for compelling text or audio content. Think outside the box and draw parallels. Our local university recently brought in Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor of the infamous Schindler’s list to talk to business executives about the outer limits of executive responsibility. A compelling parallel which was leveraged across media channels.

Do this or die!

Posted on: November 8th, 2009 by Bone Admin

Do this or die was a warning issued to advertising agencies and their business customers by renowned advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, for a Time Inc. contest in the 1960’s.  Penned by advertising legend Bob Levinson, Do This or Die can be simply summarized as follows:

Tell the truth about products and offer a product that’s worth telling the truth about.

In the midst of the biggest economic slowdown since the Great Depression that has seen the breathtaking failure some of the world’s greatest brands who failed to heed these words, this remarkable advertisement, has perhaps more relevance today than it had fourty years ago. It also provides the marrow for what we, do at Bone:

Grow your business by letting your target market know, with every means possible, that you have a superior product or service and do our utmost to ensure that what is promised equals the truth.

(click to read original article)
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