Talk about Cutting through the clutter

Today as the competition for the consumer's attention is getting fiercer by the hour it takes a great deal of creativity to cut through the clutter and get noticed.

Gillette known for its sharp cutting edge did just that in a recent campaign in Singapore. They had to find a way to get the target market (shaving males) to pay attention to their product during the morning commute rush hour.

They did it by "shaving off" a diagonal strip across the front page of the daily newspaper, creating a picture of a Mach 3 followed by a white strip across the front page news. Talk about cutting through the clutter.

The activity attracted lots of coverage in the press and helped the new product exceed its sales target by 20% in the first two weeks of launch. This campaign also picked up a Bronze Effie.

One up for Al Ries and his promotion of publicity as the marketing tool for reaching today's consumer.

Podcasting and Blogging now Marketing Tools

Hi Marketing Associates, I can’t help but be fascinated with the way in which Marketing is developing, hence my last two blogs, “Future of Advertising and Future of Marketing.”

Apparently the new generation (under 30yrs) is going to revolutionize communication.

We are already in the midst of the death of Mass Marketing, not only is the fragmentation of media splintering the target audience but this group does not consume media as the +30yrs olds. Welcome to the new media generation, they are into media experiences and interactivity and most of all peer to peer advice.

But apparently this is not the end, now we find two additional marketing tools, Podcasting and Blogging.

Far from viewing workday blogging as bad thing, IBM sees it as the next big thing for marketing.

Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it, said Christopher Barger, Big Blue’s unofficial blogger in chief.

The company now has 15,000 registrants on its internal blog, with more than 2,200 of those employees maintaining external blogs.

Its embrace of digital marketing also extends to podcasting, with the company creating podcasts around cultural tech themes such as the home of the future, the car of the future and the store of the future.

Marketers should look at blogs as a real-time cheat sheet on how to be relevant with customers, said Intelliseek's chief marketing officer, Pete Blackshaw. The name of the game is to be as conversational as possible vs. being static. ... It’s a bonding technique with your consumer.

Podcasting, last year so nascent a technology that few marketers had even heard about it, is this year a topic of avid interest, being tested by marketers as mainstream as Volvo, General Motors Corp. and Warner Bros.

The new medium that combines the audio format of radio with the download and global distributon capabilities of the Internet and iPod/MP3 players was the subject of an Ad:Tech session entitled "Podcasting's Future in the Marketing Mix."

Infant field
Podcast content ranges from slick programs developed by professional radio stations to kitchen table banter recorded by individuals. The use of advertising in podcasts is a field in its infancy, but it's marked by one clear tactic: Avoid being intrusive so as not to upset what is generally a small but very targeted audience.

The Future of Advertising

Just when we thought building a brand could not get more difficult along comes a CEO of a major advertising agency (Roberts: CEO Satchi & Satchi) who says, the advertising business has become a place where "there are no rules, there are no formulae, there is no best practice" and nobody has a clue about how to effectively market products to the masses.

Mr. Roberts suggested that the reality of the new age of marketing all boils down to the word he has used for the title of his new book: "sisomo." he explained that "sisomo" refers to the combination of sight, sound and motion as experienced on digital screens.

"The future belongs to those who can make emotional connections in the market," Mr. Roberts said. "What all of us have to do is to realize that we are in the game now of creating loyalty beyond price, beyond attribute, beyond benefit, beyond product, beyond form, beyond process, beyond technology."

The only truisms are , he said, include a good story well told, emotion, humor and music -- in other words, sisomo. The idea is that "you’ve got to be entertained as well as informed,” he said, “thinking with the heart and feeling with the brain.”

"Next year communications spending [in the marketing industry] will go past a trillion dollars," he said. "We'll spend a trillion bucks on communications in all its forms. Most of that trillion is money down the toilet that's completely wasted because it based on rational, reasoned information that consumers are just letting it go wang! wang! wang! right past them. They don't care.
"The winners in the attraction economy will be those who get to that emotional future first and fast," he said.

Future of Marketing

Hi Marketing Associates this is an interesting article by Jonah Bloom, executive editor of Advertising Age. I think it gives a good insight into where marketing is evolving. As Prahalad the marketing guru said in his recent book, the future is co-creation by consumers. Apparently so is advertising.

There is a wealth of consumers -- particularly those under, say, 25 -- whose primary source of information, entertainment, even community is an open conversation they co-create. The ability to own and control a brand, which many marketers regard as their core job function, has surely joined mass marketing in the how it used to work chapter.

Peer-to-peer power
Yet clearly many are already managing to move beyond the one-dimensional, where-do-we-put-the-ad approach to the blogosphere and word-of-mouth. What they are grasping, and others will be forced to, is the power of peer-to-peer conversations, not only to yield invaluable consumer insight -- as Garfield outlined -- but to communicate messages to and, most importantly, with them.

The open forums for registered users to discuss anything from QuickBooks itself to their business travails are very informative. Intuit uses the posts to learn how to improve its existing products and spot new opportunities. Not only that, but its software developers blog about their work so users can see what’s coming down the pipe and even suggest tweaks.

Open-source business
The creation of these kinds of communities is increasingly common in the sector, partly because they’re culturally familiar and even comfortable with the concept of an open-source business world.

What’s more surprising is the speed with which companies in other sectors are joining the conversation. Smart agencies, too, are changing their output to create more messages or content designed as shareware and strategically seeded to spread virally across peer-to-peer networks.

Direct Maketing Online and other News

Spending in the USA on direct marketing is forecast to grow by 6% annually from 2004-09 compared to 2.4% growth from 1999 to 2004. Direct, moreover, accounted for a whopping 47.9% of total ad spending in 2004, up a full point from 1999, according to the DMA.

"Direct marketing lies at the core of marketing today and is the future of marketing tomorrow," the trade group's president-CEO, John A. Greco, said in his kickoff address yesterday morning.

There's no question companies increasingly depend on direct. Karen Menachof, group supervisor at Catalyst Direct in Rochester, N.Y., has seen this trend play out with her Fortune 500 clients. "It's a reallocation of marketing dollars," she said, and "it's going to grow."

Direct marketing online
Shifts are taking place within the discipline. In the next five years, expenditures on Internet marketing (defined as search marketing, banner advertising, cost-per-lead programs and co-registration programs and/or tiered marketing programs including affiliates) along with commercial e-mail are forecast to grow at least three times faster -- at 18% and 19%, respectively -- than other direct media. Spending on Internet marketing is forecast to reach $21.7 billion in 2009, up from $12.6 billion in 2005. Commercial e-mail spending is slated to hit $600 million, up from $300 million

The rise of Direct Marketing

I recently read that the Direct Marketing Association of the USA announced that Direct Marketing expenditure now accounts for 47% of total advertising expenditure and it is expected to grow at about 6% per year. Not only that Direct Marketing using the Internet, e.g. emails, ezines etc. is growing at the rate of 18% per annum.

This represents a major shift in advertising expenditure that when coupled with publicity expenditure seems to point that the future of promotion will be below the line expenditure.

I forsee the growing importance of Trade Marketing in this scenario and the shift of personnel from being sales persons to being sales and marketing professionals.

More and more our sales team will be required to not just sell but also market the products. They will be required to adapt company wide A&P campaigns to customer specific A&P programs.

Is your sales team prepared?

Strategic Marketing in Aruba

Coach Bengo shown at a Strategic Marketing Seminar for Fed-Ex Aruba earlier this year

Al Reis Workshop

It was indeed a pleasure attending the Al Ries and Laura Ries Marketing Workshop for the C L Financial Group, thanks to Kiran Maharaj of C L Communications. The workshop was another big success, following on from their Kotler workshop. All congrats to them for making available to us in TT the premier Marketing thinkers in the world. Keep up the good work guys/gals as we eagerly anticipate another interesting workshop.

Al Ries was truly great and as controversial as his books. He poured scorn on a number of International Marketing Strategies and gave local practitioners hope of going up against the giants.

He and his daughter Laura, dealt with their new book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, I particularly liked his concepts on the Law of Pubilicity and the Law of Divergence (dealt with in my newsletter available on www.coachbengo.com ).

The challenge of these Marketing Gurus is for us to truly attempt to build regional and global brands. I hope it will stimulate a few of our local companies to take up the challenge instead of being content with just dominating the local market. I am always available to help.

Coach Bengo