C Notes Newsletter Issue 10

Bring Back The Suggestion Box

We endorse an electronic suggestion box for our electronic age. From e-mail to voice mail to intranet HTML forms – nearly any business can set up a suggestion-gathering system in almost no time, and for very little investment.

Want to make it more targeted? Try monthly guidelines. Let contributors know that this month you’re focusing on budget, or productivity, or technology – whatever the challenge of the moment is – then sit back and harvest the suggestions.

That’s the reason so many businesses relied on the suggestion box for so very long. Try a modern version for yourself and you’ll see – sometimes time-proven ideas are the best ones.

Evolutionary! Be A Dar-Winner

Business is survival of the fittest. When a business cycle is in a downturn, weak competitors fall by the wayside. And survival of the fittest means you must make sure that customers know you’re still in the game.

Business has always been Darwinian by nature – especially during the low ebb of an economic cycle. This is when the weak perish, the strong survive, and the victor claims the spoils.

Name any industry – service, manufacturing, retail – and therein you’ll find businesses that have added jobs during hard times…simply by going after clients who do business (or did business) with companies that couldn’t weather the storm.

Positioning yourself to capitalize on hard times requires a proactive strategy. One cannot wait until competitors falter to begin recruiting their customers.

A long-term strategy that performs consistently in both a tight economy and flush times is why many companies not only survive the hard times, but also thrive in them. There’s an old ditty, published in Printer’s Ink magazine in 1895, that goes: To advertise when trade is dull Is useless, don’t you see? I advertise each day, and trade Is never dull with me.

Keeping the message alive – that’s brand building – is a sign of consistency. It is how relationships are built and maintained. (Remember, even though you might not have wooed a prospect, it is important to sustain that relationship…so that someday you will.) And you can be sure your customers appreciate you’ve kept the message alive. When times are flat, your customers (and even your competitors’ customers) will remember who you are and what you’re about. That reassurance itself is a relationship, valuable for its own sake. And it can be lucrative indeed.

In tough times confidence is down, budgets are tight and few people are in the mood for experimenting with the unknown. If money is being spent, it must be spent reassuringly. That reassurance is built by maintaining communications with your pool of customers and prospects.

And so, if a competitor cannot last through a harsh economy, how expedient it would be for you if you didn’t have to introduce yourself to those prospects who now find themselves in need of a business partner. How great it would be if, when you call, their answer is: “Oh, I know all about you! And I’ve been waiting for your call!”

You’ve skipped a step on the path to closing a deal. That is nothing less than a Darwinian advantage. And it ably demonstrates how consistent marketing helps companies survive dips in the economic cycle.

Lightning Bugs And A Sock In Your Mouth : Keep The Brain Humming

Our driving desire is to become the region’s preeminent marketing consulting and communications design group. A goal like that means we need to keep our brains humming, our creativity sharp and our knowledge current and edgy.

From our lunchroom to our bedsides, we’ve been reading some good books. Following are some passages we’ve recently passed around the office. Harry Beckwith founded Beckwith Partners. His company positions and brands clients like Microsoft, ServiceMaster, Hewlett-Packard and State Farm.

In his book The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing, Beckwith writes: “Consumers buy more than things. They purchase connections.”

Beckwith is right. Nearly every business interaction you can name has personal connections at its core. We go to banks to meet with certain tellers; we get our hair cut by specific stylists; some people even buy the same breakfast cereal for decades. And it’s not just because of the bank, the haircut and the corn flakes…it’s the comfort level we associate with those transactions. William Zinsser is the author of On Writing Well, the classic writer’s guide written with joy and simplicity. “Clutter is the disease of American writing,” Zinsser writes. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

Zinsser’s observations are especially apt in marketing communications, where far too much PR and ad copy is being written without the proper input from the client. Zinsser inspires us to listen intently to the stories our clients tell us…so that our proposals and solutions will be on target and meaningful, and not the meaningless clutter of which he warns.

Clutter’s cousin is sloppiness. Highlighted in one of our office quote books is this Mark Twain gem: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.” Funny, but true.

Another funny-but-true is this one from the late ad legend Leo Burnett, who used to say, If you insist on being different just for the sake of being different, you can always come down in the morning with a sock in your mouth.” It’s a funny reminder that, yes, we must grab the customer’s attention, but the messages must always be relevant and meaningful. Eccentricity for its own sake is just an ego exercise…at the client’s expense.

Like radio announcers who address their mass audience as if they’re whispering into one person’s ear, we try to remember that every marketing message must be personal. What helps is this passage from Adman: Morris Hite’s Methods of Winning the Game: “There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and personal. It is one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching TV in the den.”

David Ogilvy, another postwar ad giant, said, “It is often charged that advertising can persuade people to buy inferior products. So it can – once.” He adds, “The best way to increase the sale of a product is to improve the product.” Clients who know us well understand the effectiveness of our consulting services in improving sales techniques, branding initiatives and packaging. And money invested on improvement (systems, methods, processes and products) reaps better returns than money spent on advertising.

I cannot live without books,” said Thomas Jefferson. We agree. Reading, whether it is directly about our business or not, always contributes to a wider frame of reference. And that is the cornerstone of progressive thinking to move any business forward.