Monthly Archives: February 2012

When I want entertainment I don’t go to the bank…

27 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by in Branding, Customer Service

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A colleague recently told me that the staff at their bank now dress up in fancy clothes, run around the customer area trying to crack jokes and generally behave as if they were part of a performance at Sideshow Alley at the Royal Easter Show.

I’m sure there’s a reason for this behaviour. Most likely it came from a highly strategic strategy planning document produced by the strategic marketers in the strategic planning area of the bank. It probably had a title something like: ‘Strategy 2012 – making the customer banking experience more fun’ …strategically speaking.

We agreed it was a bit strange, as we don’t want our ‘banking experience’ to be fun, just efficient. I forgot all about it all until last Friday, when I went into a National Australia Bank (known as nab) for the first time in over 20 years. I was doing the banking for a friend who was incapacitated.

The first warning sign about my pending ‘banking experience’ was the loud music being played through the ceiling. As you know, music tastes vary across generations and within generations, so the task of delivering music to suit all customer tastes would not be an easy one. Certainly the doof-doof sounds didn’t appeal to my musical preferences.

I assume there were a few strategic focus groups conducted to determine the most appropriate music and the odd strategic planning session to determine the audio strategy for the branches. But the volume was quite loud, I assume to drown out the sounds of the street noise – trucks, equipment and the like. It forced you to almost shout at the poor teller to make yourself heard, pardon me?

The second warning was the branded ‘kids corner’ with a few random toys. As anyone  knows (even non-strategic people), the body language of a kids corner implies the service will take a long time. Because if you have to entertain the kids it means you’re waiting around somewhere in a queue.

The next warning about my forthcoming ‘banking experience’ was the row of plasma screens behind the teller area. They displayed trivia questions. But before the answer to the trivia question was given you had to endure a nab advertisement. I am not making this up.

Take a minute to think about this – some super-strategic team of strategy planners and strategic executives, has decided that the strategic solution to the problem of waiting around in queues is to force people to watch trivia Q&A and bank advertisements.

Why not use the bank’s strategic planning genius to solve the problems of the delays in the first place? Invent a solution to poor service, rather than give up and try to make the ‘banking experience’ more fun? I just want to do my banking and get out. I don’t want to be delayed, let alone ‘entertained’ during the delay.

The answer, from my humble observation, was to employ the right amount of staff to serve the customers – nab certainly has the profits to pay for a few more staff.

You see, there were three teller windows in this particular branch. It was lunchtime on Friday. Guess how many tellers were working? You guessed good – only one teller window was working. And in my layman’s opinion, if you had three tellers working, you would decrease the delay in serving customers so the bank doesn’t have to worry about trivia contests, kids’ corners, doof-doof music and other ‘entertainment’. But that’s just me.

I did eventually get served. Although during my waiting around I noticed that nab branding was everywhere – even little carry bags designed to look like fashion shopping bags, branded highlighters, pens, note paper and more.

There were also ‘shelf-wobblers’ stuck to the teller counter. I’m not sure if these were meant to make the nab customers feel superior or to make potential nab customers feel inferior. They were alleged quotes from other banks’ customers giving excuses as to why they wouldn’t switch banks. Now I’m sure these were obtained legitimately in a strategic focus group and a strategy planner came up with the idea of displaying the quotes as strategically as possible. That’s why these public sledges were displayed right where people were getting served. I suppose they were there to ‘entertain’ you while you wait?  But they did seem a tad patronising and condescending. Certainly a prospective customer (like me) might feel a little offended as a result of reading them, as they implied non-nab customers are jerks.

However. here’s the rest of my ‘banking experience’ for you. After all the power-branding and fun things I’d experienced (and still listening to the music) my teller had a hand-written piece of paper with her name on it, taped over an official brand-guideline approved name tag. It was a Persian name of some sort, Alfalfa or something? A young woman, she wore make-up by Dulux and had horrid chipped nail polish on every finger that she used to process my banking bits. Nothing worse than dirty nails in customer service.

One of my requirements was to deposit a US currency cheque. Unfortunately Alfala didn’t have authority to do so. She had to get the Manager to approve it. So Alfalfa walked out of her open teller box and around me, to a woman sitting at a desk in the middle of the banking chamber, just at the back of the customer queue.

So the Manager of the branch was the one we had all walked past, without a greeting, and was sitting there observing us, while we all waited to be served.

I think it’s obvious how to make the banking experience more enjoyable – but unfortunately it doesn’t need a strategy document or sophisticated strategic thinking. It just needs enough people to do their job as efficiently and pleasantly as possible. Then if we want to, we customers can go and entertain ourselves at the places strategically designed for fun.

Why most marketers fail with QR codes

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Direct Marketing, QR Codes

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QR codes are not new. They have been around for about 7 years but their use has been held back by technology – that is, the availability in the market of mobile phones able to scan the QR code.

But now that ‘smart’ phones are the dominant phone, QR codes are more accessible than ever before.

To understand how to use QR codes, you need to understand how to design a direct response advertisement.

Whenever you design a direct response advertisement, regardless of media, you should always start at the finish. Start with what you want your customer or prospect to do as a result of reading your ad.

Do you want them to go to a website, pick up a phone, download or fill in a form, scan a QR code?

Once you know what you want them to do, you design your response mechanism as the first part of designing your ad. Once you have written your ad you give it to someone of average intelligence (or anyone really). That’s because there are more people of average or lower intelligence in the world and their money is the same as rich people’s. If they understand the ad and can respond as required, then you should produce the ad.

If the marketers using QR codes as the response device followed this procedure, they would understand why QR codes should not be the only response device on an advertisement.

They would discover that most people with ‘smart’ phones have not downloaded the QR code App and cannot respond to the ad. In fact in my country – Australia – less than 6% of smart phone users can scan QR codes.

The scanning technology is not native to the handsets. It requires the user to go through the hassle of downloading the App. And given we are lazy by nature, many people opt-out of downloading the App and ignore the QR code.

Yet retailers abound who are rushing to establish outdoor virtual stores for the 6% of the smart phone population to use.

The rule for putting QR codes in your ads is simple. Just as users can download a copy of Adobe PDF Reader to read a PDF file, the advertiser should offer an easy way for the prospect or customer to download the QR code App. See the image below.

And they should offer an alternate way to respond, otherwise they risk reducing their response to only those who want to use QR codes, which is a very small percentage of the population.

Make it easy to download the QR code App

Super Bowl ads go down the drain…again

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Branding, Media

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Another final of the NFL has come and gone – high five. And another year of analysis paralysis of the advertisements that run during the half time break is underway – high five.

Sorry I’ll stop that – high five – it’s just that the game hardly goes 13 seconds without half the players giving each other skin or touching up each other’s butts. There’s this weird compulsion by the players to over-celebrate everything they do, from breathing to standing still.

I first started observing the Superbowl ads over 20 years ago. I was fascinated by the claims being made about the number of people allegedly watching the ads at half time.

I was also curious about the repeat purchase rate of ads by advertisers, which at the time was extremely low. By the time we got to the great dot-con, half the advertisers had gone broke within a few months of running their multi-million dollar ads on the show. Cause it is a show, it’s not a football match.

I’ve found you can learn a lot just by studying basic human behaviour. And I ask you, what do people in your household do when the advertisements interrupt the programme they are watching, particularly if they are male? I make the comment about males, because it’s physically impossible as a male of the species to watch television without the remote control in their hand. Males would rather leave the room and do something else than lose control over the remote.

If your friends and family are like most people, they do something other than watch the ads – at the least they tune out. I’ve asked audiences of marketers around the world ‘what do you do during the ad breaks?’ and they inevitably provide answers that have nothing to do with watching television.

They make a cuppa, go to the toilet (we’ll come back to that one) get a beer or snack, read something, channel surf  – to use a marketing term, iron, paint toenails, smooch, scratch, make phone calls, text, play with their tablet or mobile, etc, etc.

The fact is that the half time break in any big sporting event is when the smallest part of the audience is watching the television coverage. And it’s more extreme with the Superbowl because it’s 90 minutes from start to half time and after you’ve been sucking down a six-pack of Buds for 90 minutes, the first thing you want to do when the game stops is to take a leak.

According to different sources, some of which have been quoted on television, whole water reservoirs in the US visibly lower during half-time of the superbowl because it’s the single biggest flush of US toilets at any one time during the year.

The reality is, a much smaller audience is watching the ads than watched the first half of the game. Most are relieving and refueling themselves, so they can load up on beers again in the second half.

I tested this theory in Sydney during a rugby league grand final. I asked the Water Board to track the water flow during half time of the Penrith v Canberra Grand Final. And guess what? It was the single biggest flush of the Sydney water system that year.

Yet advertisers continue to blindly pay a fortune to allegedly reach a large audience that doesn’t exist. Well it exists- but mostly during the game, not the ad breaks. Even the superbowl advertisers have turned the ad break into a PR event to try to ensure they get an audience worth paying for.

So you have to wonder if all the cost of production, publicity and monitoring means the ads pay for themselves? Certainly in 2012 lots of people tweeted – but Twitter is a closed environment with only those on Twitter able to participate – and that’s a very small part of the population.

Maybe the objective is not to get a return on the cost of the advertising – that seems acceptable amongst many marketers, though am not sure their shareholders would share/hold the same view.

I don’t follow the NFL and didn’t watch the show. But I forced myself to watch a reel of the ads – to say they were underwhelming is an understatement. But we’ll leave commentary on that to another day.

It’s marketing meeting déjà vu all over again, again…

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Direct Marketing, Marketing

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Have you ever had that Groundhog Day feeling at the office? You know the one, where life seems to repeat itself over and over again?

groundhog day

Well I seem to be having more and more Groundhog Days. Maybe it’s because I’m not as young as I once was, so not much is new anymore? Or maybe I’m working with so many fresh-faced marketers, it’s just new to them but not me.

Mostly my Groundhog experiences occur in marketing meetings. The meetings seem to involve the same issues and problems discussed more than 25 years ago. I’m hearing the same arguments and opinions, the same bitching and moaning, the same attempts to impress with vacuous new buzzwords – it’s déjà vu all over again, again.

Even worse are conference call meetings. It seems most people spend more time on their smart phones, tablets or laptops working on their emails, than contributing to the call. The productivity is disastrous.

marketing meeting

In 2003, in sheer frustration, I created Marketing Buzzwords Bingo to keep people awake in marketing meetings. I’ll have to reload it in my blog for you, so you can use it to keep your sanity in these tedious time-wasters.

But this is the curious bit – we have now had over 50 years of university marketing degrees, 40 years of TAFE advertising certificates, 31 years of direct marketing certificates and 14 years of online/digital marketing courses – and yet we are still making the same mistakes day-in, day-out, year-in and year-out.

We don’t seem to be learning from our past . There is no collective corporate knowledge passed along to young marketers. Instead of learning from the mistakes and successes of others as part of their induction, new recruits are left to fend for themselves and repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. And we all know that definition of insanity about doing the same thing over and over?

Part of the problem is the quality of the tertiary education. It seems that every time a marketing graduate is hired they require remedial education so they have a semblance of usefulness. Our universities are not providing the skills necessary to work in current marketing departments or advertising agencies. So you can’t blame the graduates.

Another part is the lack of interest in further professional development – people believe that because they work in the industry they don’t need to study or feed their brains. Particularly as there is no requirement for them to study, like there is in professions such as medicine, law and the like. “I have my degree, therefore I am…”

marketign graduate

One common mistake that still exists is with those who confuse ways of marketing with media channels. For example calling “direct marketing” a medium, or “digital marketing” a way of marketing. Or assuming DM is limited to mail. Even worse when there is acronym confusion. “This meeting is about CRM” says one. “Yes I know” says another, “Customer Relationship Management“. “What are you talking about, it’s Cause Related Marketing” – whoops.

As any marketer worth their salt knows, there are only two ways of marketing. One is mass marketing and the other is direct marketing.

Here’s another example that stunned me, though it’s not uncommon. Recently I consulted to a BIG DATA company. They make their money flogging data to companies from SME’s to major financial institutions and government departments. They are busying themselves with distractions such as “the pursuit of likes”, yet their own data is so abominable. They cannot personalise email messages to their own clients because they don’t have their names on file.

That’s right folks – imagine the body language of the messages from a data company, when those messages cannot be personalised? Talk about damaging your brand’s credibility. Instead of trying to come up with new offers, repackaging old products, or posting on social sites, they would be more profitable if they just got to know their customers better.

Dear whatsyaname?

Dear whatsyaname?

As the old saying goes, “if your customers don’t make you rich, who will?”

Marketing is not complicated

But marketers do their best to confuse – using buzzwords with over-emphasis on ‘strategic‘ or ‘engagement‘, etc. In simple terms, marketing creates the need, while sales fulfills the need. Though much direct response advertising does both. Everything you do must contribute to either acquiring or keeping a customer profitably.

And there is an argument that marketing is not technically vocational

Vocational training emphasizes skills and knowledge required for a particular job function (such as typing or data entry) or a trade (such as carpentry or welding). Marketing does have qualifications and there are many rules to follow if you want to succeed. But the craft often involves a very broad measure of opinion, rather than specifics – unless of course you are working with data.

Professions such as law and accounting have rules and laws that practitioners need to abide by. And there’s generally only one way to fix a leaking tap, or electrical fault – rules and vocational skills apply. There is a specific way to draw up a set of accounts for example, but not to spend money in media, create an advertisement, or even publish content in the digi-world. Yet there are a million opinions on how to do so.

And that’s the rub – these marketing meetings seem to occur to solve matters of opinion rather than fact, which is why they are so dull and go round and round in circles.

I once removed the visitor chairs from my office so people wouldn’t waste my time sitting in them and deciding when they would leave. It upset a few, but it meant conversations were quick and to the point. Much better productivity.

Maybe if all marketing meetings were held standing up, the attendees would focus more on the facts and issues, not the opinions?

standing in meeting room

Well that’s my opinion anyway!

 

 

 

 

 

PPC advertising is much older than you think…

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Digital, SEM & SEO

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Ask any young digi-marketer – particularly those who have only been in the workforce post the great dot con – ‘how old is PPC advertising’ and they’ll inevitably say about 10 years. Some may guess at 15 years, or say ‘as old as Google’.

The fact is, PPC advertising is at least 80 years of age, possibly older.

birthday cake

PPC advertising was started by direct marketers before WWII. It was called Pay Per Coupon advertising where the advertiser paid the media owner a commission based on the number of coupons received from ads that ran in that publisher’s print publications.

Then came an amazing new service that transmitted voice over data lines (known commonly as the telephone) and Pay Per Call emerged where media owners were paid commissions on the number of calls received from an advertisement. This grew with the penetration of televisions and phones in homes.

Now in the new century we have Pay Per Click, the latest evolution of PPC, where the media owner is paid when people click on ads on websites. The major difference is the faster speed of measurement and the depth of associated data.

Even the landing page tests of Pay Per Click ads are just versions of the original split-run tests conducted in traditional print and mail media.

Many young marketers don’t study history. They assume that because something is new to them, it is new to the world. It’s an easy trap to fall into – our tertiary marketing education is quite out of touch. The first thing we do when we employ university graduates is give them remedial education to bring them up to date and make them useful.

Young marketers are making expensive mistakes as they learn new technology. Yet if they took time to understand the ways of marketing and what has always worked in all media, their results would improve and their careers progress faster.

That’s assuming of course they are interested in results and careers?!