I'm all about revenue growth

Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial (yes, I admit it again, it was on sports talk radio) for the Chevy Volt. I was only half listening to it, but it caught my attention when it said something about "those guys that were so good at chemistry are now working on the batteries for it." It then went on to say that the Volt will come out in the 2010 model year.

I realized that I was listening to an ad for a car that won't be available for a year! This ad is from the same car company that just went before Congress and stated that they won't make it to the end of 2009 without a congressional bailout. So, my first thought in hearing this ad was "shouldn't they be trying to sell the cars they have, rather than cars they don't?"

Then I thought, "maybe they're trying to revise their brand from 'uninteresting, middle-of-the-road cars for the masses' to 'leader in clean automotive technologies.'"

But this post is actually not about GM's advertising, it's about branding. As in, I'm not a branding guy.

That ad made me realize that, for more than a decade, I have been a marketer focused on revenue growth, rather than branding. My marketing focus was:

1. Understand customer needs and define the appropriate product or service to meet those needs
   
2. Use the appropriate promotional tools to drive revenue growth for those products and services
   

There's nothing in those two items about establishing and building brands. That's because many of the companies I worked for were small, even startup, companies where revenue was King. (Actually, cash was King, but revenue was a very close second, probably Queen.) We didn't have the luxury to invest in establishing a brand.

It's not that I don't appreciate the value of branding and would enjoy the opportunity to establish and build a brand. In fact, if you read several of my past posts on advertising, I am frequently referring to branding. Examples include my recent posts on a couple of radio ads, one discussing Microsoft's new I'm a PC campaign, or the one discussing La Quinta (whose brand apparently is 'hotels for idiots.')

I would love to do some branding work, but at the end of the day I'm a revenue growth marketer.

Love those Discovery Channel shows

A 24-hour bug has been working its way through our house, so last weekend we found ourselves on the couch watching TV. We ended up watching Discovery channel all day. We were already fans of Mythbusters (which we have TiVo'ed for some time now) and Dirty Jobs. On Saturday, we also discovered Time Warp, How Stuff Works, and Prototype This!.

We (the boys and I .. I'm not sure I can include Gina) love these shows! We are clearly in the channel's demographic. Big Science Saturday has pretty much stopped since we started working on Destination ImagiNation this season, so maybe Discovery Channel will replace BSS.

TV can be just as stimulating and educational as science experiments, right?

Another good BSS event

It's not quite NCAR's Super Science Saturday, but there's another fun Big Science Saturday event coming up.

Each fall and spring, the first-year engineering students at CU host a Design Expo to show off their design projects. The projects are judged by working engineers from various companies around the area. For three hours during the day, though, the Expo is open to the public and the public can vote on their favorite project to win the People's Choice Award.

You can find more information on CU's Integrated Teaching and Learning Program website. It's another good opportunity for me to expose the boys to science and engineering in action.

We'll see you there!

Brilliant viral video from MoveOn.org

Someone just forwarded to me a viral video from MoveOn.org that I love. In fact, I forwarded it to about half a dozen people myself. As I write this post, their counter states that it has been sent to 9.2 million people (one can never trust counters like that, by the way).

I love it because it is entertaining and pretty effective, at least in delivering a message. I don't care about the particular political position it takes. I love it because it's a very entertaining way to send a message to people to get out and vote. I would love to see if it actually delivers votes, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I would love to use a viral video like this in a marketing campaign, but there's one problem. The ability to predict the popularity of a video is very limited. The Jib Jab guys never were able to replicate their original success with follow-up videos, and YouTube is a graveyard of attempted viral hits.

As I mentioned in my radio post, home runs are hard to predict. To extend that baseball metaphor a little further, base hits are far more predictable and drive in just as many runs.

Radio ads really work (2 of 2)

On the last post on this topic, I mentioned that one of the reasons that these two ads work is because of sheer repetition, which is required in almost all forms of advertising. We're all familiar with single commercial events that leave a lasting impression, like the Apple Orwell's-1984-with-the-sledgehammer-through-the-TV-screen ad. But the likelihood of an ad becoming iconic like that is less than one in a million. For instance, can you name another Super Bowl ad from that year? I'm sure there were others that spent a lot of money on high concept ads.

The point is, you can't count on single ad home runs, much like you can't count on videos going viral. You can count on repetition, however. But I've already pointed out that repetition isn't enough. While necessary (if you don't want to bet on home runs), repetition isn't sufficient. So what else makes these ads successful?

They're also successful because they're unique. The Lennox Financial owner/spokesperson has a southern accent, speaks with authority, educates when he speaks, and has an attention-grabbing presence. His simultaneous authority and folksiness serve to make listeners pay attending and trust him. Most chief executives do not have screen or radio presence, but this guy does, and they have made the most of his abilities.

The Advanced Tax Solutions ads are equally unique, but in a very different way. There is no company representative in the ads. Instead, all of the ads are read by Irv. Irv's an old guy, a kind of grandfatherly character of whom you're never quite sure if he's still all there. But when Irv's folksy, clumsy delivery is combined with actual customers describing their situations and the company's successful resolutions, it comes across as very believable.

Obviously, uniqueness works well for these guys. Of course, uniqueness doesn't always work. Remember the Quizno's rat-like things?

Radio ads really work (part 1 of 2)

First, a two-part confession:

(i) I have never had the opportunity in my marketing career to use radio as an advertising medium.
(ii) I listen to sports talk radio. Not exclusively, but enough to seriously compromise my snooty, high-brow, elitist literati posturing.

So, I found myself thinking today about two series of ads that I have heard forever on sports talk radio. One is for a mortgage company, Lennox Financial, and the other for Advanced Tax Solutions, a firm that helps people who are in hot water with the IRS.

Here's what I find interesting about these two series of ads: I can tell you the name of those companies off the top of my head.

Not that I'm the market for either of these services, mind you. I have no need for a new mortgage (and I already have a great mortgage guy, Bill Zuetell at Lendmor), and I have been a dutiful citizen with regard to the IRS. I don't think about these services at all. Ever.

But if the need arose, or if someone asked me about these types of services, I am able to come up with the names of these firms and have a good enough feeling about them to call them. That is the definition of effective advertising.

So why do these work? I think there are a couple of explanations.

The most obvious is repetition. These ads have been on for at least a couple of years with the same theme. However, there are lots of ads that have been on the radio for years with the same theme that are not nearly as memorable, so there's something else that works for them.

Each of them has a unique ad design that they have kept constant over the years. The Lennox Financial ad features the company owner describing the current state of the mortgage market and the implications for the homeowner. And he always closes with the same line: "It's the biggest no-brainer in the history of Earth."

Similarly, the Advanced Tax Solutions ads are also a constant, seemingly unchanged over many years. They come on during Irv and Joe and, in fact, are all read by Irv. They always feature client testimonials, with the actual client on the air responding to questions from Irv.

These ads have been on forever, so they should have made an impression in sheer repetition alone. But I'm sure there are other ads that have been on these stations forever that I can't recall as well. Why is that? I'll discuss that in my next post on this topic.

Separate quality control from sales?

Our refrigerator died yesterday. Actually, it didn't die, but it was very sick, with a compressor that couldn't keep it cold enough anymore.

The cost of a new compressor was well over $500, and almost half the cost of replacing the fridge. We decided to replace the compressor, rather than the whole fridge, although someday I'm going to revisit the economics of that decision. For now, it just annoyed me to have to spend SO MUCH money just to keep an old appliance alive. The repairman also was in our home until almost 10 pm doing the work.

Although the repairman was helpful and doing his best to be empathetic, I was in a bad mood about the whole experience and couldn't wait to get this guy out of our house.

After he presented the invoice and accepted payment, he handed me a customer feedback form for me to complete, insert in an envelope, and seal. I took a minute or two to do so.

The first couple of questions were about the quality of service: did the service person explain the problem clearly, was he courteous, on time, etc. I gave the guy some credit because, other than taking longer than he estimated, I thought he did a good job.

Then the next several questions, taking up about 2/3 of the entire sheet, were questions for selling new services:

• Does anyone in the home have allergies?
  
• Dry skin?
  
• Does the air conditioning keep the house cool enough?

On and on ...

Was this a quality assurance questionnaire, or a sales questionnaire? There were so many sales questions that it made me question whether the company really wanted to measure service quality at all. I think they couldn't care less. They just want to put me on a mailing or phone list for having my heating ducts cleaned or to have my air conditioning serviced.

At the end, they had a numerical rating scale for their service quality. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would have given the guy an 8, even though I was annoyed with having to pay all this money and have this guy in our house all evening. But after being hammered with more sales questions, I gave him a 6.

Not that they care or that they'll even look at it. They'll mostly be annoyed that I didn't answer any of their sales questions.

While selling should be a regular part of a company's interaction with a customer by any employee, there is one area where the presence of sales is inappropriate. Sales should not be part of quality assurance, other than the implicit message that the customer should want to buy more because the company is so focused on quality.