Archive for April, 2007

You Don’t Mean THAT!

April 29th, 2007 by Chief Nut

When writing ad copy, knowing it’ll be translated into a foreign language, you have to stay on your toes. Derrick Daye, with Branding Strategy Insider, shares some brand trivia which includes some of these gaffes:

In Spanish, Colgate can be translated into “Go hang yourself”

KFC translated it’s tagline “Finger lickin’ good” into Chinese for the first time and it came out as “Eat your fingers off.”

Pepsi translated it’s tagline “Pepsi gives you life” into Chinese and it meant “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”

Here are a few more …

Chevrolet’s Nova flopped in Mexico because it means “No go”

Similarly, the Ford Pinto failed in Brazil because Pinto is slang for “tiny male genitals”

A Parker Pen ad slogan, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” was translated for the Mexican market as “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”

Frank Perdue’s slogan “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” was translated into Spanish (Mexico) as “It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused.”

Let me tell you, I am DEFINITELY gun shy about translating our tagline “Go nuts”!

Brand-in-a-Blink

April 28th, 2007 by Chief Nut

You’re driving down the highway and a mile up ahead on the other side of a tree you spot a small section of a sign…. The only thing you see is the side of a bright yellow curve…. You immediately pull over for lunch because you’re 100% sure you just found a McDonald’s restaurant. Did you need more brand input than that?… Nope.

Here’s a similar story (possibly urban legend); It’s told that the design of the curvy Coke bottle was based on the shape of a Cocoa bean but was created so that, even when the bottle is dropped and broken into small pieces, it’s still recognizable as a coke bottle.

Seth Godin calls this Brand DNA …€” while describing his experiences of hearing two notes of a Steely Dan song or seeing just the edge of a New Yorker magazine.

A Business Times article from Malaysia refers to the LACK of this type of brand reenforcement in the world of property developers…. Pillani Pillai, a Singapore brand strategist, says that it’s “typical for a property development firm to launch 5-7 properties at a time with NO consistency in naming”…. Conversely, Kaufman and Broad homes, here in the U.S. does create strong name and style brand consistency. For instance, when buying a home in California there is almost immediate recognition that you’re driving by a K&B development when you see just the entrance sign to the neighborhood or the roof line of one of the houses.
Is your brand strategy powerfully consistent? Do you have brand DNA?… How quick will people pick up on your unique offerings?…

Integrated, Schmintegrated

April 27th, 2007 by Chief Nut

What do these things have in common?:

  • Your web activity logs
  • Your last direct mail postcard
  • Your last advertisement
  • Google analytics
  • A landing page on your web site

Give up? Answer: They’re all small pieces of your marketing mix but you’ve probably not integrated any two of them together!

Hugh Bishop (Chairman of British Direct Mail powerhouse agency Meteorite) commented in a Marketing Week article that the amount of data that is available, or can be collected (willingly) from the consumer, dramatically changes how marketing can be performed. He says:

With this knowledge comes the power, not only to find potential new customers but also to take them on a personal journey delivering the right messages at the right time, via the most appropriate media. And thanks to the new digital channel, all of this can be delivered in more cost-effective ways than ever before.

Unlike “pure” digital, the [Direct Marketing] industry can fuse who brands want to talk to, what they want to say and where and when it is best to communicate with consumers. This in turn enables the [Direct Marketing] agency to deliver individual and effective customer journeys.

So, it’s NOT about creating single point campaigns designed to sell or “pull.” It’s more about discovering who your audience is …€“ using objective data …€“ and then offering up an experience. Build a relationship with your audience members and you’ll be able to create evangelists, not just one-time buyers.

The “Future” of Your Blog

April 26th, 2007 by Chief Nut

This tip comes from A-Ha Guy Allen Voivod

Hot Blogging Tip: When you find your brain is overflowing with blog ideas and you’ve got a string of them just lined up and waiting to pour out…. Let loose!… THEN, before hitting that “Publish” button, change the time stamp on the last few so they appear over the next day or two instead of posting right away.

This fab tip will even out your postings, give your frontal lobe a much needed break and, if you find you’ve got still more ideas busting out of your cranium, you can simply change those time stamps again as needed.

Now THAT’S a Mouthful!

April 22nd, 2007 by Chief Nut

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
…€” Dan Quayle

Blogging as a Threat

April 21st, 2007 by Chief Nut

Here’s a story from ResumeMachine.com.

Recently we had a server glitch where an order was only partially processed and a wrong boilerplate follow-up letter was sent to the customer…. Needless to say this was verrrrrry confusing to the customer.

What was interesting was, like many customers that become irate (thank goodness we get so few), this person did NOT threaten to notify the Better Business Bureau, nor did he threaten to call his lawyer, nor did he even threaten to file a charge back with his credit card provider…. What he did threaten to do was to blog about this event!!! AMAZING.

I took a look at his blog and guesstimated what kind of reach and impact his post would have and it was significant…. He could indeed cause a lot of damage to our brand if he were to have posted his original thoughts and feelings…. We were able to rectify the situation with this customer by providing an extension to the service and a refund for the inconvenience of it all.

This realization of how he might use his blog as a weapon within a customer service situation didn’t change our course of action … we always strive to make the customer happy at any expense…. However, this certainly does change my perception of how a blog can be used by the consumer!

In this case we were lucky…. The customer let us know that his negative blog post was a potential recourse for him.

Question: How many companies don’t get that warning… … don’t provide the correct level of customer support, and then BAM, they get hit with a doozie of a blog post…. YIKES!

Your customer has a lot more power today than they had in the past!… Before, an angry customer, frothing and yelling at the front counter, could be heard by 3 people all the way over in aisle 11…. Now, they can be heard by 3 billion people around the world.
I hope this shifts your paradigm a bit.

Keep It On

April 20th, 2007 by Chief Nut

Good friend and Radio Maven, Bill Phenix (WXRV-The River), told us about a new tagline for one of his clients - Powers Generator in Spofford, NH. The company is a full service generator dealer here in New England. Their new tagline is (as you’ve guessed by now); “Keep It On.”

Short, punchy, not too direct (regarding product/service), emotion based …. this all equals LOTS of tagline velocity. BRAVO guys!!

Creative Branding … Dilbert Style

April 19th, 2007 by Chief Nut

Creative branding, for sure, includes the first (and hardest) step …�� coming up with a fabulous name … a corporate name, a product name, or a service name. A LOT of your branding potential rides on the back of how creative and “on brand” the name is. My question to you is, “WHO should do the heavy lifting of name research and brainstorming?” Probably the best group would be the brand/marketing people. That is their job, is it not?

The trick is to give this task to the people with the right mindset and the right creative skills… somone who understands the process of how to creatively build brand. It certainly shouldn’t be the engineering team. Definitely not the line workers. Not the sales folks. These are all pretty obvious but what about the thousands of companies who have a C-level person (usually due to control issues) dip their hand into the name-game a little too deeply at the expense of brand effectiveness? Or, now my favorite, how about when you let your corporate attorney do the naming?

Read this hilarious Dilbert strip by Scott Adams!

When the wrong people are involved in this critical process, the brand suffers. When a process allows personal opinions and “design by committee” to overide and squash a well thought out creative plan, the brand suffers. BE PICKY PEOPLE! The committee should be 3-4 hand picked individuals who understand:

  • the creative branding process
  • the importance of indirect, lateral thinking
  • the direction and the mission of the company
  • great brainstorming session rules

You Really Should Read Outgoing Letters

April 14th, 2007 by Chief Nut

Greenville, SC …€” Greenville County, Dept. of Social Services. In a letter addressed to a former food stamp recipient:

Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we have received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.

hmmm.

Lowe and Estevez were Buzzworthy

April 13th, 2007 by Chief Nut

Two years after the movie St. Elmo’s Fire came out (holy cow, that was 1987), I was visiting a friend of mine at Pepperdine University. We were walking from the dorms across campus and something was happening. You could feel the buzz in the air. People were walking faster. People were whispering to each other. Complete strangers were talking to each other in an odd way. Then, we became part of the wave…. some girl, all a titter, told us that Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez were on the campus, but she didn’t know where they were. Just the idea that they were on campus was worthy of buzz. A few minutes later, as we were walking by the track and field area, GUESS who we ran into?! We introduced ourselves, they introduced themselves (as if we didn’t know), we chatted a bit and we went along our merry way.

OK, I told you that story so I could tell you this one…

In Seth’s recent post he share’s his view about “worldviews” and how they impact our internal filtering mechanisms and daily actions. He’s referencing a Washington Post article about a test. One where world class violinist Josh Bell - and his priceless musical instrument - played outside of a D.C. subway station to see if anyone would take notice. Would thousands of people pass up the opportunity of experiencing genius simply because they didn’t recognize what was in front of them? You should read the story yourself. It’s a fascinating social experiment.

Here’s a snippet from Seth’s post:

If your worldview is that music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is invisible.

HEAR, HEAR! So, what’s the difference between the two stories? Both involve something out of the ordinary suddenly appearing out of normal context, in public. The first story involved SOMEbody recognizing the situation and starting some buzz. The second story didn’t.

Lesson for business owners; When it comes to marketing your product or service, the presentation, the context, the quality, the features, the benefits … they ALL matter very little UNLESS you can connect with people. Like with Josh Bell, although he was “giving away a free world-class performance, it didn’t matter to people because they had put up their blinders. Their anti-spam filters were so heavily set on “high”, there wasn’t a way for them to recognize what was happening right in front of them.

So let’s try to predict what would happen if we combine these two stories. If, in front of the subway station, as part of the social experiment, we planted a couple of evangelists … people who would go around to just a couple of other people around them and whisper to them “Hey, that’s Josh Bell playing on a priceless Stradivarius”. How quickly would that next person’s paradigm shift? How quickly would the filters be turned off? Bottom line; How quickly would they then stop to make note of what was in front of them? Possibly more important is the question, how quickly would the buzz spread through the crowd??

Business marketing is NOT about showing people your features or quality. It’s about connecting with them first … THEN you can talk about your features and benefits. Show your features before you connect and you won’t be able to penetrate the filters, just like Josh Bell … except he owns a Stradivarius and you don’t.