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NOTE: This is my first guest post, contributed by Edward Segal. Edward is the author of two books,
Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and Profit by Publicity. He was the marketing strategies columnist for The Wall Street Journal’s StartUpJournal.com, a PR consultant to more than 500 clients and press secretary to members of Congress. He is now CEO of the Marin County Association of REALTORS® in San Rafael, California.
If you saw an unmarked bottle of brown liquid, you’d have no idea of its purpose or taste.
But if the same bottle carried the famous Coca-Cola logo, you'd know exactly what was inside the bottle. You’d even have a good idea of what the liquid tastes like.
Such is the power of branding, which can immediately communicate the purpose, benefits and advantages of a product or company through the use of a name, logo, symbol or phrase.
If branding works for Coca-Cola, Apple, Google and thousands of other companies and organizations, then it can certainly work for you to quickly communicate who or what your company or organization are, what you do, how you do it, etc.
Deciding what you’d like your image and reputation to be, and taking steps to effectively promote your brand, takes careful thought and planning.
To help guide you through the process, I’ve prepared a series of short videos on how you can create and market your brand. The series is based on a workshop I conducted for the California Association of REALTORS®.
I'm visiting California and on Saturday toured the Donner Memorial State Park.
It's the site of the 1846 winter camp of the infamous Donner Party.
In case you've forgotten your American history, the Donner Party was the hapless band of Westward emigrants who resorted to cannabalism when their food supply ran out.
The fatal mistake the Donner Party made—the misjudgment that led them to wind up stranded in a wintry trap in a steep mountain pass—was taking a shortcut.
How many times has taking a shortcut led to disastrous outcomes?
Consider these recent examples:
- Wall Street took a shortcut in 2000 when it gauged the risk of mortgages by applying assumptions based on "credit default swaps." The problem? Credit default swaps had only been around for 10 years. In their brief lifetime, the price of homes had skyrocketed and nobody knew how a crash in home prices might affect credit default swaps.
- On the morning of April 20, the day the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP executive ordered the engineers operating the rig to take a shortcut to speed up the drilling.
- Toyota became so determined to beat rival GM, it took manufacturing shortcuts that have resulted in recalls of more than 10 million vehicles in 2010 due to faulty accelerators and brakes.
What shortcuts are you contemplating?
Are you troubled by the fact that negative impresssions are more powerful than positive ones?
You can blame it on Darwin.
According to neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, evolution has hard-wired our brains to "default" to a state of constant vigilance.
Without knowing it, we're always scanning the environment for threats.
In the Jurassic Period, our mammalian ancestors did this consciously.
One hundred and fifty millon years later, we're doing it (albeit unconsciously).
Science describes this vigilance as the brain's built-in "negativity bias."
The brain's negativity bias is bad news for marketers.
Social scientists and neuroscientists studying the phenomenon have demonstrated that:
- People will do more to avoid loss than acquire gain;
- Negative information about someone carries more weight than positive;
- It takes five positive interactions to overcome the effect of one negative interaction; and
- Even after a negative interaction is unlearned, it leaves an indelible trace in the brain that's easy to reactivate.
What does the science suggest?
Your marketing has to work doubly hard to counteract evolution's subtle effect on customers' neurophysiology.
As if you didn't have enough to do.
A client of mine, Randy Lieberman, owner of the B-to-B telemarketing firm Foundation Marketing Group, told me yesterday that his business grew during the "Great Recession" and continues to grow in its aftermath.
In our virtual world, where Tweeting, Facebooking, texting and emailing have become the primary means of communicating, the old-fashioned phone call has made a comeback.
And why not? Suddenly, a phone call stands out.
Tradeshow producers are among the heavy users of outbound B-to-B telemarketing.
According to new research by the Large Show Roundtable, a whopping 85% of large-show producers use telemarketing to attract attendees to their events.
It makes a lot of sense, if you consider the highly "perishable" quality of the show producer's product.
Like the operator of a cruise ship, a tradeshow producer can't sit still while she waits for sales to grow incrementally. At a certain point, the ship sails, full or not. That's all there is to it.
Have you tried telemarketing recently? Or are you sitting still?
Disclosure: The Large Show Roundtable is also a client of mine.
Ardath Albee's new book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (which I recently reviewed) has so many exceptional passages it's hard to single one out.
But at the expense of the others I'll point to a passage in Chapter 11 (titled "Create Content to Increase Attraction Value").
In that passage, Albee examines some of the chief reasons why so many B-to-B marketing programs, like the characters in Cool Hand Luke, result in "failure to communicate."
According to Albee, a prospect's willingness to expend effort to absorb your marketing message is a pretty firm measure of her intention to buy.
That readiness to expend effort represents your moment of truth: your golden opportunity to move the prospect toward—not away from—your organization.
In that split second, the prospect's ready to learn from you. As the Tao Te Ching says, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
Alas, it's an opportunity easily squandered.
You're toast, Albee contends, if the marketing communications that await the prospect are convoluted, or if you're unclear about the reason you want her to pay attention to you.
Fail to be clear and pointed and you'll be written off. Once and for all.
Albee writes, "People take the path of least resistance. Once they reach a conclusion, your opportunity to connect with them has been determined. If they perceive that paying attention to your communication is too costly in terms of effort, they will delete it, bury it under the paperwork on their desk, or otherwise ignore it. This is why setting expectations in your call to action is so important. Make sure that what they need to do to access and use your information is obvious. Eliminate barriers and hurdles that add to their effort. Make it easy for your prospects to take advantage of your expertise. Simplify their experience and the effort required to interact with your company."
Albee suggests removing all "effort barriers." She emphasizes four:
- Generic content (material not developed specifically for your prospect)
- Busy Web-page layouts
- Statistics cited without context and
- Copy-heavy pages that readers can't scan
You'll find more suggestions like these in my new report, Path of Persuasion. Take a peek. It's free.
