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The Malcolm Auld Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2014

Prestige Danish brand prefers real to virtual for customer engagement (and sales)…

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Digital, Direct Marketing

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

advertising, branding, content marketing, direct mail, direct marketing, Helena Christensen, marketing, Ole Lynggaard

Last year, “Our Mary” returned to Sydney to open the first Ole Lynggaard store in Australia. (That’s Princess Mary of Denmark for you uncultured lot)

PrincessMarycutsribbon-300211

Our Mary opens the Ole Lynggaard store

My bride became what is known in marketing jargon as an early adopter of the brand. While she didn’t quite kick in the doors on opening day, she was one of their first customers, which is one reason I’ll be working til I’m 90!

Ole Lynggaard is a luxury jewellery brand created by Danish designer Ole Lynggaard in 1963. His daughter and son now also work in the family business and it is expanding globally. The brand is living proof there is rarely a recession at the top end of the market.

So last week a courier knocked on our door and asked my bride to sign for a parcel. She had no idea what it was, but opened it with interest.

Here’s what was inside:

photo

An embossed cream box from Ole Lynggaard. It contained a hand written personal card to my bride, signed by Ole Sydney. (I would have signed it from an individual, but that’s just me).

Ola Lynggaard 002

Postcard

Ola Lynggaard 003

Personal message on rear of postcard

The card was sitting atop a 128 page colour book (coffee table quality) featuring all the latest products in this year’s range.

Ola Lynggaard 004

Cover of 128 page 4-colour book

The book is chock-full of stories and beautiful photographs of the jewellery, including a number of evocative shots of Helena Christensen taken from the current advertising campaign.

photo 1

Helena Christensen & jewellery

Here are some of the jewellery images.

photo 5

photo 6

Did I mention there were evocative shots of Helena Christensen?

photo 3

The book and packaging would have cost well over $150 each. But any marketer worth their salt knows the power of tactile mail and the massive ROI when executed properly. It is far more emotionally engaging than anything in the digital world. The science proved that years ago.

Yet so many marketers seem to have forgotten the power of the proven channels and have followed fashion into the unproven ones. But hey, who cares? It’s not their money – it’s just a budget.

As my bride said while conducting her nightly fawn through the book (it’s now a bedside table read) “I would never spend as much time on a website as I do looking at this book. Plus I find new things every time I open it.”

She has even taken it from our home to show her friends – I pity their poor partners. If Ole had included an offer or incentive of any kind to encourage first-time buyers who knows how many new customers he would have?

Did I mention there were evocative shots of Helena Christensen?

photo 2

And guess what? My bride’s birthday just happens to be on the very near horizon. The word “hint” doesn’t come close to describe her subtle suggestions for a gift – if you get my drift. This cannot be good for my forthcoming annual health check.

Ole’s lucky he doesn’t live locally – we might have a word with him about toning down his brilliant marketing. Although I must admit, I do enjoy flicking through the photos – from a creative design point of view of course.

In fact, I might just take another peek for a minute or two to see if anything inspires me to write a blog post. In case you’re digi-impaired, writing a blog post is now known as content marketing.

Did I mention there were evocative shots of Helena Christensen?

 

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Two marketers walk into a bar and laugh at Honest Slogans…

22 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

advertising, branding, copywriting, slogans

Clif Dickens is a graphic designer who creates Honest Slogans reflecting what people really think when they see a brand.

Avagoodweegend…

LinkedIn

Old Spice

Kickstarter

tinder

yelp

wikipedia

LV

starbucks

Perrier

Maybelline

Lee & Perrins

Lays

hallmark

Buzzfeed

lululemon

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More marketing bollocks by clueless “experts”…

14 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, BIG DATA, Content Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

advertising, BIG data, content marketing, CRM, direct marketing, marketing, social media

The internet has created some fascinating new habits, particularly in the social media channels.

One that has grown rapidly is the posting of vacuous, meaningless, blatantly false infographics that claim credibility because, well, they’re infographics. They have images to go with the words, so they must be true!

This lame one’s done the rounds lately – though not much graphics. I suspect it’s distributed by people who have never run their own business, or spent their own money marketing their goods and services, or they only started working in marketing after 2000.

6 new rules

As you know, anything claiming there are new rules to the way people behave when they part with their hard-earned cash, is bound to be chock-full of bollocks.

Let’s deconstruct this shall we, to help the uninitiated.

THEN – Find customers
NOW – Be found

For decades marketers have run ads in all sorts of media, created content for all sorts of media (articles, videos, printed inserts, white papers, seminars, websites, etc) and done as much as they possibly can to be found by customers. Yellow Pages comes to mind – the original analogue search engine.

You would tell prospects and customers what you sell and where you sold it, then hope they would buy from you when they were in the market. You went about finding customers, by making sure you could be found – so to speak. And here’s the rub, in 2014 you still have to find customers – now you just have more channels in which to do so.

customers

What fool thinks all you have to do is create content and stop your advertising or selling? The punters don’t awaken each day, search for content and then kick your door in to throw money at you. Why do you think Woolies and Coles continue to use unaddressed catalogues full of sales copy for example? Maybe it has something to do with “because catalogues work“!

The purpose of business is to acquire and retain customers profitably – always has been, always will be. You just have to find the best channels to get them.

THEN – Demographic
NOW – Behavioural segmentation

Yes, behavioural segmentation has evolved rapidly since the mid-1980’s. It’s not new though. In the 19th century catalogue marketers inserted offers based on previous purchase behaviour. Now we just have more behaviour to track, because we can track every activity online.

behaviour

And don’t ignore demographics. They are still very handy. Want to sell pool cleaning products for example? You don’t need behavioural segmentation, unless you regard selling chlorine to people with pools, as against people without pools, “segmentation“? Just use any online mapping tool to peer into people’s back yards, then get the pool-owner’s address from street view – it’s not behavioural rocket science.

It’s the simple use of demographics, based on the behaviour of owning a pool. Then you mail them offers and information (sorry, content) so they know where to find you when they are consuming gallons of pool cleaning content on the web.

THEN – Mass advertising
NOW – 1:1 Communications

Hello, is anyone home? 1:1 communications was so popular it became a buzzword in 1980. Dozens of companies named themselves some version of “One to One Marketing“. If you read “How Brands Grow” the brilliant book from the Institute of Marketing Science, you’ll get a clear picture of consumer behaviour and understand why mass advertising is not going to die, just evolve stronger than ever.

CTA

And if you want a sure sign that 1:1 marketing online is struggling, just look at the hotel category. The moment every online brand starts spending a small fortune running television ads on the same day, often in the same ad break, you know they are in strife. Trivago, Hotels Combined, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc are desperately using mass media to survive. Some won’t make it, you can be sure of that.

The maths explain it. The more competitive a category (like travel), the more it costs to buy generic keywords and break-through the digi-clutter. And the more costly it becomes to acquire a customer, via PPC, SEO, social media, content marketing, et al. So online marketing becomes too expensive. The marketing department says “we better try mass advertising on TV to generate leads“. Smells like 1999 to me.

THEN – Point in time blasts
NOW – Continuing relationships

I’ve owned a retail supermarket, travel agency and a number of B2B businesses. They were all built on continuing relationships. That’s why a whole industry was created, again over 30 years ago, called Customer Relationship Management (or Marketing depending upon your jargon). It was so popular it became an acronym – CRM! You know you’ve made it in marketing when you have evolved to acronym status.

relationships

I don’t know any business in the history of the world that succeeded THEN by using point in time blasts – most people don’t even know WTF it means? Has the author of this infographic ever run a business?

THEN – Few isolated channels
NOW – Exploding integrated channels

Yes there are definitely more channels now – some work, some don’t. As for them being integrated, that’s a drawing a long bow and not the main reason to use online channels.

I vaguely remember some time last century when ads ran in newspapers, magazines and on television with a call to action. People could ring a phone number, clip a coupon, or visit a website to respond – we didn’t label this as integrated media channels, we just assumed it was common sense. (click here for the history of PPC)

integrated mktg

Whenever I ask my audiences of marketers at seminars, “who has a current accurate database of their customers?” only about 10% – 20% answer in the affirmative. When I ask “who is following fashion and rushing to every new digi-channel that opens” the majority of the audience is in the affirmative. Why chase fashion, when you don’t have healthy business basics?

If you have a customer name, address, phone number and email address you can run a business. But without customers you don’t have a business. By all means, test different media channels, offers and creative to grow your business – that’s fundamental. Just don’t rush to every new channel because it exists. Test and learn, test and learn is the mantra. Always was, always will be…again.

THEN – Intuitive decision making
NOW – data driven information

Aaahh the old chestnut. Nobody used data until 2010 – what utter bollocks. I opened Australia’s first data consultancy in an advertising agency in 1988! Database Marketing magazine was launched in Australia in 1994! Data-driven marketing is decades old, it’s just more prevalent now.

Why do these sad tragics think that just because something is new to them, it is new to the world?

customer behaviour

The real issue is that traditionally, the big brand marketers didn’t use data to drive their marketing on a one-to-one basis. In most cases they didn’t need too, as the population (and therefore market size) was growing organically. So mass marketing was the easiest solution.

But if you ran a small business (about 70% of all businesses), or one based on the way of  direct marketing, you ran your business using one-to-one tactics and by building relationships based on customer behaviour. If you didn’t you went broke.

The only thing that has changed is the internet has exposed marketers who previously didn’t use data, to the benefits of using data – lots of data in fact. And these marketers are often those who had big media budgets to flog things like packaged goods. So now they invest some of those media dollars in data capture and analysis, so they can continue to flog things like packaged goods – whoop de woo.

Welcome to the real world kids – wake up and smell the coffee. If you took time to study marketing history and examine the truth, you’d save yourself loads of time and money – and probably stop wasting electrons by forwarding dishonest infographics.

I’m off to make a cuppa and maybe have me some content…

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Me Likey Miss Chu’s travel…

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding, Customer Service, Direct Marketing, Marketing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

amrketing, branding, customer service, direct marketing, Miss Chu

Long time readers may recall my discussions about the savvy marketing by Vietnamese street noodle chain – Miss Chu. Here and here if you’re interested.

Well given Miss Chu’s ‘migrant’ theme using her passport imagery and background as a refugee, the obvious next step from flogging fresh dumplings is to offer food tours of Vietnam.

That’s right dear reader, Miss Chu has teamed up with a Melbourne travel agent and is merchandising the tours in store, using a very authentic looking passport as the brochure.

miss chu 001

miss chu 002

miss chu 003

miss chu 004

This is a wonderful brand extension at very little cost and I imagine little risk. It fits the Miss Chu brand perfectly – come to Vietnam for a culinary tour. If you’re interested you can download the full passport brochure here.

This brand is evolving as fast as the chain is growing. And while it’s ‘street food’ it’s certainly not street prices, which demonstrates the value the brand is creating.

Who knows what we’ll see next in the world of marketing? A former mail-order record salesman launching space tourism for the public. Yeah right.

I think I need to eat some dumplings, my mind’s wandering…

 

 

Talk about

 

 

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Is Apple the new IBM? Can Microsoft become sexy?

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

advertising, Apple, branding, IBM, Microsoft

One of the hats I wear is that of university tutor. I’m teaching “Advertising Principles” and one of the ads the students are analysing, is the famous Apple television commercial – 1984.

This is interesting in a number of ways, the main one being none of the students were alive when the ad ran. It is at least a decade older than the students – frightening really.

A quick glance around the room and you can see the power of the Apple brand. Of those students who use a laptop or tablet to take notes (or surf while I teach) all but one uses an iThingo. Australians have the highest per capita ownership of iThingos in the world.

iPad-in-education-classroom

But one student stands out – he has a new Microsoft “Surface” tablet. I asked him why he bought it instead of an iThingo and he said it was a better tablet. I couldn’t argue as I have no idea which is better, though when asked, everyone has an opinion about it.

I then asked him how he felt being one of the only ones who owned a Surface on campus. He smiled a wry smile and said “a rebel“. Apparently other students have been ribbing him about his choice of tablet – but this only gives him a sense of pride in his individualism.

Surface_Pro_3_Review_Dan_holding_front

If you had asked me to do a word association test with Microsoft, the word “rebel” would not have made my list – ever. Let alone “individual“. Just picture all those Mac versus PC ads, Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs – the brands are poles apart. Back when, Apple was the challenger brand to the Champion brand of Microsoft and the associated PCs.

As a result of this insight, we explored the position of the Apple brand today, compared to when the 1984 commercial ran. For those who don’t know, it only ran once at halftime in the Superbowl.

In the 1984 ad, IBM was positioned as the big brother computer company forcing all people to comply like slaves without choice, to IBM standards. The Macintosh was supposed to set people free from IBM (and PCs) and give them choice.

The Apple ad was to reflect George Orwell’s book 1984 and was directed by Ridley Scott, famous for Blade Runner and the Alien movie series.

Fast forward 30 years to 2014. Now Apple is the dominant computer brand (and has just partnered with IBM in business products). Users are restricted to the Apple operating system and on most iThingos cannot use software like Flash for example.

The class argued that Apple is now very much like IBM was in 1984 – domineering, controlling and all-powerful. So what is the opportunity for Microsoft – that once domineering, controlling and all-powerful software brand?

Well here’s a thought – Microsoft could become a challenger brand to Apple! It could position itself as a rebel brand for those sick of being an iSheep.

isheep

Imagine Microsoft versus iThingo ads, where iThingo was the grey standard while Microsoft was the bright future?

Given the way digi-fashions change so quickly, anything is possible. After all, geeks now rule the marketing world.

Just look at what designer stains have done for tattoos – you’re not a celebrity unless you have a (obviously visible) designer stain. Only a few years ago the only people with tatts were bikies, criminals, returned vets and ladies of the night. Now school teachers wear their stains with pride.

microsoft atttoo

So it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Microsoft becomes sexy and once again rules the world! That in itself is a scary thought – but from a marketing perspective it’s a delicious one.

Though as much as I don’t like to say it, they’ll have to rebrand first – that logo is sooo last century. And it has no retro cred.

I’m off to check the share prices – you never know…

 

 

 

 

 

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Two marketers walk into a bar and tell conference call jokes…

01 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Customer Service, Telemarketing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conference calls, customer service, meetings, telemarketing

We’ve all sat in them – conference calls. They can be the most non-productive meetings ever conducted. Attendees spend their time doing everything but focus on the call – stare at their phone screens, do their emails, chat to others, read stuff, dose off and more.

This video – a conference call in real life – gets it spot on.

Avagoodweegend…

Dilbert-Conferencecall_000

60-6004-5XDB100Z

'Nobody?! Well, since we're all stuck in traffic, we may as well do this by conference call.'

phd080206s

MjAxMi1iNzM4OGFkODEzZWNiZTAw_52432bd252f40

images

index 1

'It's not easy to eat breakfast, text, conduct a conference call and drive at the same time...but I did it!'

1af93ce62a3ec97a5d70ec028b9fc7d4a661b42cb5c11ec9bf77bbe1b54f5024

butt

 

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Recent Posts

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