Quality advertising and marketing

It's been a while since I ranted about advertising and marketing (or anything else, but those are among my favourite rant topics).

I just saw this piece of quality work today:

[Name of publication] enjoys an influential and affluent readership and seeks to maintain that profile by those brands it represents.

If you would like to know more about our rates and availability, please feel free to make an enquiry our team we will do thier best to assist your in achieving your campaign goals.

Sign me up.

And on marketing, I've noticed a few annoyances lately.

First was Healtheries' decision to stop decaffeinating their green tea. Their website still assured consumers that all Healtheries green tea was caffeine free, but this was no longer the case if you checked the label in the shop. When I emailed them about it, I got an informative reply, very quickly, from a real human being (not a marketing droid) who explained:

The reasons we have moved away from decaffeination are:

1) Being a health food company we were keen to produce a product as
close to un-processed as possible, the decaffeination process adds
additional processing and uses chemicals to strip out the caffeine

2) The cost to decaffeinate the tea is quite substantial, by removing
this cost we have been able to pass this on to our consumers making us
more competitively priced

3) A side effect of removing caffeine is that this can also remove some
of the antioxidants in the tea, we wanted to maximize the antioxidants
naturally found in green tea.

If you would like to remove the caffeine, research has shown us that if
you brew a tea bag for approx 2 mins and throw out the first cup of tea
the second cup you brew with the same tea bag will have over 80% of the
caffeine removed (as caffeine is the first thing released out of the tea
bag).

All of which is well and fine, but nobody else in the NZ market decaffeinates their green tea either, so the consumer is left without choice (and Healtheries have removed what was, to many people including me, an important point of difference). The brewing for two minutes thing didn't work for me, I noticed a bitter taste and was getting edgy on it. I've now switched over to (non-Healtheries) rooibos tea instead, which is supposed to have, if anything, even more antioxidants, which is regarded as a good thing.

I now discover, searching Healtheries' site, that their chai teas are decaf - when did that happen? I could swear I'd checked the packets and they weren't.

Not bad marketing, as such, but their business decision is odd (and inconvenient) to me from an overall market perspective, and their consumer communication could use some work. Good marks for their response to me, but as far as I can tell they didn't follow my suggestion to put the explanation on their website (it's not in their FAQ). I had to check the new packets to find out they weren't decaffeinated any more, and I completely missed the fact that the chai, which is my favourite, is decaf (perhaps it wasn't to start with and now is?).

On the other hand, some companies still practice the good old "marketing through outright lies" approach. I had a minor example in the supermarket recently. A woman was there with one of those little demo tables they use for new foods, demonstrating a new breed of apple next to the fruit section. I'm always up for some new fruit (fruit is my treat, instead of sweets or chocolate), so even though she had only one rather browning segment of apple on offer I gave it a try. "It's really sweet and juicy," she told me. Well, it wasn't particularly, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt because it had obviously been sitting for a while, and bought a couple.

In fact, this is one of the least sweet and least juicy breeds of apple I have ever encountered. I wish I could remember its name so I could warn you off it. It has yellow skin, anyhow, and its marketers lie about it.

And then there's the iCON fan. We have one of these. In fact, we've had three, because the first two burned out. They were the size recommended for a bathroom, which is where we have it, but they were clearly underpowered, so last time I got the larger one.

They're supposed to be quiet. They're not. They're very noisy, in my opinion. They're also advertised as "surprisingly low cost". What with the cost of the fan, the cost of the initial installation (in a house which is a little tricky, admittedly), and the cost of having the first two removed and replaced when they failed, I have spent well in excess of $1000. Still, at last we have a fan that removes the damp from the bathroom, which I suppose is something.

Free press releases

I spent quite a bit of Friday submitting press releases to a number of sites, a process which is often more fiddly than it needs to be. A couple of the sites I simply couldn't get to work at all; their CAPTCHA tech was faulty or the forms wouldn't post.

The easiest to submit to is NZ's own Scoop; you just email the editor, rather than having to register and fill out an online form which asks for the same information as all the other websites, but in a different order.

Here's Scoop's version of my press release about City of Masks. They changed the headline from "Book Promotion, New Style: Novelist Makes Maximum Use of Internet Technology" to the more clickbaiting, if slightly deceptive, "Renaissance Hits the Internet".

Anyway, for your reference and mine here is my collection of sites tagged "freepressreleases" at Del.icio.us.

Incidentally, I also found a nice site which you can use to submit a web page to multiple social bookmarking sites: Haliboo.

You can put a button like this on your site:



(That's functional, by the way - when you click it it will submit this site. It'll submit whatever the URL showing in the browser is, so if you want to bookmark this particular post rather than my whole blog, click the post's permalink first. That's the title of the post, for those unfamiliar with how Blogger does things.)

Phone Spam

I got phone spammed for the first time this morning.

Some guy claiming to be a stockbroker rang from New York chasing business. Things on Wall Street are clearly worse than I thought if they're resorting to randomly calling people halfway round the world. Of course, it could just have been a scam, which is only one of the reasons I wouldn't have even considered doing business with him.

As soon as I'd figured out what he was about (after his cheesy attempts at geniality had fizzled), I told him that if I wanted goods or services I went looking for them and that I didn't appreciate being called. The smart thing for him to do would have been to apologise, get of the phone and leave me merely irritated rather than actually angry, but he started arguing back, wasting more of my time. Eventually I had to talk over him, saying "Thank you, sorry, goodbye" (the first two of which I didn't mean) and hang up.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures!

MadScam - full review

Last week I included Madscam by George Parker in my list of marketing and advertising books that I was reading.

I've now finished it, so here's a fuller review.

Firstly, George Parker is a stereotypical advertising person in some ways. He's loud, over-the-top, obnoxious, knows less than he thinks he does about the world in general, is sometimes "clever" at the expense of making his point clearly and simply, and his sentence structure and punctuation are a bit ropey at times (especially towards the end of the book). But he has some good, sensible advice to offer about advertising for small to medium businesses, both things to do and things to avoid. Top on his list of things to avoid is employing a big advertising agency; second is producing advertising that's just like everyone else's that says that your businesses is just like everyone else's. (The second would be a consequence of the first, he strongly suggests.)

Here are some notes I took of things that were specifically relevant to me, as someone with a small hypnotherapy practice that I want to grow larger. There's a lot more to his book than this, though, and it's well worth your while to get a copy and read it.

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): In 20 words or less, what unquestionable benefit do you provide at a fair price to satisfied customers? Can you claim to be first, best, to have a wider range of inexpensive products, a smaller range of high-quality products, to be easier to transact with, more effective, more flexible than your competition? On the other hand, is there something that everyone in your industry does but nobody else mentions? That can be your USP, even though it's not unique.

The Communications Plan: Write down what (the market situation), who (your target groups - research through the Department of Statistics, blogs etc.), why (your USP), and how (your creative strategy and design).

Research why people go to your competitors, and why they stop going or are dissatisfied.

In your advertising, talk about benefits to the customer, not features.

Then put a twist on the concept.

Promote the business, not just the product.

Follow Winston Churchill's advice: Begin strongly, have one theme, use simple language, leave a picture in the reader's mind, and end dramatically.

Good advertising requires, in order of importance, information, time and money.

George Parker claims, of course, that you don't need to read any other book on advertising apart from his, but then he would. Any suggestions for other good books out there?

Why will nobody tell me their price?

One thing that New Zealand websites in particular are very bad at is telling you basic stuff like hours and prices.

I've just been trying to find out what it costs to advertise on radio in New Zealand. I still don't really know; the only radio station that will tell me on their website is a Chinese station, which isn't my target market.

I did find Mediaworks, who have ratecards for advertising on radio stations' websites. But their page on actually advertising on radio is all about why it's a good idea - not how to do it or, crucially, how much it costs. Their Contact Us page doesn't even have an email link or any names; just a physical address and phone and fax numbers. (Yes, people still use faxes for business in New Zealand. Hello? Twenty-first century?)

I should not have to phone a possibly pushy salesperson in order to find out I can't afford something. It's a waste of their time and mine.

(Yes, I know. Lately I'm more the Irritable Man than the Innocent Man. I blame too little centering prayer. Seriously.)

Marketing and Advertising Books

Marketing and advertising are topics on my mind recently. I have a small hypnotherapy practice that I'd like to turn into a larger one, and a self-published book about to come out.

This involves a bit of a mental shift for me, since for years I've despised marketing and advertising. What I'm discovering is that marketing and advertising people are not all empty-headed, annoying liars after all; it's just 99% of them giving the rest a bad name.

I've got some books from the library to help me, and here are some brief reviews.

Promoting Your Podcast: The Ultimate Guide to Building an Audience of Raving Fans by Jason Van Orden is one of those rare "how-to" books that is almost pure gold from beginning to end - the over-the-top claim in the subtitle is not entirely unjustified. It's packed with useful tips and knowledge, step-by-step instructions and ideas. Of course, because it's a printed book and podcasting is an online medium, even though it was published in 2006 it's already becoming a little out of date - a few of the sites he mentions have changed or disappeared, and I'm sure more will do so as time goes on. But apart from the specific guidance for how to use particular sites, there is also a lot of good advice on podcasting per se, which will remain relevant for a long time. I'm podcasting my novel City of Masks as a promotional tool, and wouldn't be doing so anything like as effectively if I hadn't read this book.

Pair that up with What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere by Ted Demopoulos. Again, packed with good stuff - Demopoulos interviewed over a hundred people who are using blogs for business, and there's some excellent advice here (along with a little bit that you can probably take with grains of salt). It's led me to start yet another blog, Living Skillfully, on my hypnotherapy website, with the aim of increasing traffic and connecting more directly with my potential clients (as well as sharing useful tips, ideas and news about mind-body work, health and self-improvement, naturally). He covers business uses for blogs and podcasts, planning, making money and promoting and tracking your stats.

One tip I picked up from both these books: use Feedburner. It's a free service that provides all kinds of tracking and additional promotion resources for your blog or podcast feed.

I dipped into The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products, but it's written by marketing academics - which is to say, a lot of it is empty of actual meaning when translated into English, and much of the rest is unsupported guesswork.

Simultaneously confirming my prejudices about the advertising industry and helping me with practical ways to get people to know about my products and services is Madscam by George Parker, an advertising creative who has no time for the "big dumb agencies" which hang out on Madison Avenue, wasting the money of large corporates. His blogs Adscam and AdHurl, at a casual glance, are just vulgar abuse being heaped on advertising agencies, but his book is a lot more useful. Not only does it (amusingly) give examples of what big corporates and their ad agencies do wrong, but it tells you how to do it right, how to plan and implement an advertising strategy that will be cost-effective and will help you build your business. I'm looking forward to putting the advice into practice.

Badly thought-through advertising

Advisory: Ranting.

On my commute this morning I was contemplating how badly thought through advertising is sometimes. I can't find an image on the net (partly because I don't know the product's name - you'd have to be really close to read it, and for bus stop advertising, this is stupid in itself), but there is a poster around at the moment which conveys to me a message which I'm sure the advertisers didn't intend.

The background is a waterfall in some idyllic spot. A man is standing with his head tilted back so that it's aligned with the waterfall as if he's drinking from it, but he's clearly not. Behind him, low down on the bottom left, is an ugly bottle of some yellow drink which I assume is the product.

Here's the thought bubble I imagined:

"Ugh, that looks like flourescent urine. I'll turn my back on it and fantasize about drinking fresh water instead."

I'll try to take a photo of it if I see one close to home.

The last advertising campaign I saw that was this stupid was a long, rambling poster about how some woman - I forget her name - "used to walk this way to work", but now she doesn't, because she went to some tertiary institution - I think Unitech - and got a qualification and now she's doing what she wants. (Presumably involving either working somewhere different, living somewhere different, or owning a car, or some combination.) These posters were all over the city. It made me wonder how, a), this woman ever got any work done if she was walking all over the city on her way to work, and b), how she ever had time to study as well.

And don't even get me started on the Burger King bikini girls. Quite apart from the obvious objectifying exploitation angle, those models have clearly never eaten a burger - or, probably, a square meal - in their lives.