Monthly Archives: November 2005

The Power of Belief

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Belief is a powerful thing. It is essentially the driving force behind all of our actions.

In order to understand how to market and brand your company (or product/service), you should have some understanding of what people believe. Am I saying you must become a theologian of all religions? No. What I am saying is marketers and sales professionals should become theologians of the religion of buying.

People do not make individual decisions within a vacuum. Each purchase decision is based upon a lifetime of training, learning, and experiencing. These elements culminate in the development of a belief system. This belief system, left unchecked, dictates what decisions people make. As a marketer, you have two choices:

1) Complement. Build your sales and/or brand off of this belief system.
2) Challenge. Build your sales and/or brand by challenging this system.

Complementing is easier (once you understand the belief system) and faster than challenging. If done right, many products that follow this path are purchased with little or no thought given. The idea-of-your-product works in concert with already established beliefs in order to create an offer that is hard to resist.

Challenging is harder and more tedious than complementing. It’s also more risky. This is where you’re swimming upstream. You’re asking people to deconstruct part of their belief system and allow you to help them rebuild it. This takes trust and time. If this is done right, you have created a loyal following of customers who have given thought to why they buy from you. Why is that important?

Companies and products that complement are in greater risk to competitors. Actually, the hardest part of complementing is finding a market that isn’t already occupied. And if it’s already occupied, then you either have to challenge people’s belief that they should buy from your competitor or tweak the offering in order to appeal to those whose belief system wouldn’t allow them to buy from your competitors.

In order to challenge beliefs, companies have to enter into conversations with potential buyers.

Inspirational Exercise

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If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend, you’ll have plenty of time to do this:

1. Write out the things in this world that bring you life. Could be a person, an activity, a tradition, etc. Just make sure they are things that energize, inspire, or breath life into you. You should be able to list at least a dozen things.

2. Now write out a second list. This one should contain things that bring you death. These are the things that give you that sick feeling in your stomach when you think about them. These are the energy-suckers. What is it that you hate to encounter in life?

Come back next Friday (December 2) and I’ll show you what to do next…

Advertising as Entertainment: Update

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Practicing our telepathy, John Moore (of Brand Autopsy) and I struck a similar chord on our most recent posts. Citing an Adweek article, John takes issue with RadioShack’s VP of Marketing and Brand Communication, Kieran Hannon.

“We want to entertain [consumers] and make RadioShack relevant and exciting again for people to shop at. We have high awareness, but not high relevance. People don’t realize the depth and breadth of products we have.” [SOURCE: Adweek | Nov. 7 | pg.6. Emphasis mine.

John says, “If you are expecting a multi-million/multi-dimensional Holiday advertising blitz to make a brand relevant, then you should expect to fail.”

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Advertising’s Answer to Their Own Problem? Entertain

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I attended a marketing association meeting yesterday. I don’t usually attend this group’s meetings because they tend to focus on only one of the 4 Ps of marketing – Promotion (go figure). This time looked different though. The summary of the presentation was as follows:

Let’s face it. Our marketing world is coming apart at the seams. Consumers are running from us. Media is fragmenting. Technology is evolving at light-speed and impacting our lives even faster… Time has become the new currency. And entertainment the new information purveyor. What does that mean to marketers? Big changes, baby. It’s the Darwin Era in American marketing. And the survivors will have branding in their DNA.

This is a presentation given by the VP/Creative Director of the most prominent ad agency in Tulsa. I thought, “Holy cripes! They got it.” I really didn’t expect traditional ad agencies in the area to have this figured out yet.

So, I go to the meeting. At the beginning of her preso, she got my head nodding quite a bit. She talked about transparency, citizen marketers, and the need to develop relationships with customers. She did a very good job of laying out the problem. Then came the solution. And in true ad exec fashion, she gave her solution in the form of ADVERTISING. She played ad after ad of what she thought was funny, cute, and well-targeted. Uhm… so how is that transparent?

So, the solution to being transparent and developing relationships with customers = advertising that is more creative? Are those “Big changes, baby?” How about advertising that is more transparent… authentic? Instead, it sounded like the same trite answers from the same clueless advertising execs.

I was amazed that in nearly the same breath, she praised Starbucks and Burger King (don’t hyperventilate John Moore). Talk about polar opposites! Starbucks is all about the customer experience and very little about advertising. Burger King is all about advertising and very little about the experience.

I went from nodding to shaking my head. I couldn’t disagree more with her accolades for Crispen Porter & Bogusky. Are they creative? Yes. Entertaining? Yes. But they’re also participating in the marginalization of marketing. Marketing no longer has to relate to the business, products, or services they promote. They just have to entertain the target audience. It’s like the offspring of the worst of Madison Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. And it disgusts me.

So what happened here? Why did I get sucked into a presentation, only to find out that it really wasn’t “as advertised.” It all comes down to one little sentence I glossed over in the presentation summary:
“And entertainment [is] the new information purveyor.”

Entertainment is apparently the best method for transparency according to ad agencies.

They still don’t get it.

Byproducts of Busy Bees

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Lately, there’s been something churning inside of me. A feeling that there’s something bigger going on.

Have you ever felt that? It’s a sensation that there’s more to what you’re doing than just marketing products. More than just writing blog posts. Like a bee retrieving pollin from flowers in order to make honey. He’s doing more than making honey, he is cross-pollinating and helping the flowers to flourish. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s doing it… but then again, maybe the bee has that churning inside of himself as well.

If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you probably have figured out that I’m an idea person. I think of myself as a BIG idea person though. I don’t like to aim low. I like BHAGS (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). The problem is that I often never reach the lofty goals (personal and professional) I set. I get discouraged by that sometimes. Then I hear someone say what they’ve seen me do as I was a busy bee chasing some big idea I never reached. I was trying to make a huge honeycomb, but had to settle for a small one. I was such a busy bee I did not notice all the flowers I cross-pollinated in the process. If I slow down for a moment and look around, I see the beautiful blooms around me. Something bigger was going on.

I’m not saying this to give myself some sort of pat on the back. The bee can’t really take credit for the side effects of him fulfilling his purpose. Actually, this is a reminder to myself as I currently have many friends, family, and colleagues who are dealing with serious, life-impacting issues. I sit and wonder whether or not I’ve done any good for them.

Maybe you’re a BIG idea person also. Take a moment to notice the roses in your life that you helped flourish… maybe unknowingly. Listen to the compliments that people pay you on your life, career, family, your encouragement that meant so much to them, the time you spent with them when they felt lost and alone. Don’t dismiss it. Accept them. Embrace them. Hold onto them long and tight. Realize that even though you may have aspired to do so much more, what you did was meaningful.

Sometimes the beautiful thing about an idea isn’t seeing it being completely fulfilled. Sometimes the beautiful thing is what happens as we pursue the BIG idea.

So, may you open your eyes and see the open flowers surrounding you today. May you pursue your purpose in life and continue to breath life into others… one flower at a time.

(Dedicated to some special “pollinators”: Max, Betty, Jory & Joy, Michelle, Stephanie, Pastor Patrick, and in loving memory of The Dunhams)