The Marketing Viking

If you’re a direct response marketer, you soon learn that what someone says in a survey or focus group and what they’d actually do with their money are two different things.

Why is this?

There are a few main factors:

Social Status: they want to say they’d make the intelligent, cool or sophisticaed choice because that’s how they want others to see themselves.

Social Pressure/Conformity: if everyone else is choosing the same option, there’s a reward (acceptance) for joining the majority and a punishment (rejection, sometimes hostility) if you don’t.

Delusion: people often have a view of themseves that bears no real relation to how they act in the real world.

I was reminded of this when I saw the cartoon below:

So, how do you deal with this as a marketer?

It’s still worth getting people’s opinions, but you need to take those opinions with a pinch of salt and test them out in the real world.

Remember, in business, people don’t vote with their opinions, they vote with their money.

Steve

I want to give thanks to a client of mine, Jamie Miller, for pointing out that the BBC had a programme about David Ogilvy last night.

I missed it, but I’ll watch it on bbci over the weekend.

Staying on the Ogilvy theme, Drayton Bird - who worked with Ogilvy and has the very enviable quote “Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world” - David Ogilvy, on the cover of his books - mentioned me in his blog this week. 

As you can see, it wasn’t bigging me up, but for someone in my line of work, it’s a brush with greatness.

Steve

If you’re like me and spend too much time watching TV, you may have seen this:

link to really dumb ad

I’d love to see the research the agency took to Ford to justify their idea.

I can only imagine it went something like this:

“When we interviewed Ford dealers up and down the UK, we kept hearing the same thing: prospects are asking ’that’s a nice looking car, but does it double up as a French horn?’

“This lack of dual functionality is a deal breaker and costing you £millions in sales each year.

“Therefore, we believe the key selling point of the new Focus is that it can be disassambled and turned into a number of different musical instruments.

“If you focus on that benefit in your ads, you’ll dominate the car/instrument combi market and success will follow as inevitably as night follows day.”

It’s the only way I can imagine they could have pitched this.

Unfortunately, I’ve no way of figuring what was going on in the heads of the Ford execs that made saying “yes” to that nonsense seem like a good idea….

Steve 

With the evenings getting colder and darker, I’ve been spending more time in front of the TV and I’ve discovered something: TV advertisers think we’re stupid.

What do I mean?

Here are 3 things I’ve seen in TV ads in the last few days: 

(1) Alan Hansen pushing a shopping trolley around Morrisons because it saves him money.

(2) The queen of detox diets, Carol Vorderman, marvelling at saving a few pence on some crappy pizzas at Iceland.

(3) Joan Collins queuing to get served at a post office.

(the only true-to-life thing about the Post Office ad was the staff chatting among each other while a customer was waiting)

None of these things has credibility. So, why are they being used to sell? And, do they work?

My answers to these questions:

(a) I don’t know.

(b) I don’t know.  

There are three reasons why the ads might work:

Firstly, each of the 3 ads contains a sales message (two of them are price and the Post Office ad lists services available from the P.O.) and getting your sales message from the mouth of a celeb - even when that celeb is incongruous with the product/message - is usually better than not getting it out at all.

Secondly, all three sales messages are fairly “factual”. They don’t really need you to take a leap of faith and trust them.

Thirdly, the “what the f*** is Alan Hansen doing in a supermarket” effect draws people’s attention to the ads.

Those are the reasons why they might work, but on the flipside, the endorsements are so phoney they’re robbed of any power.

My guess is that all three ads could have been improved by showing an “ordinary looking person” talking about their experience.    

Steve

Effective copy - whether it’s an advert or a web page - tends to have certain elements and each of these elements serves a purpose and should appear in a logical order.

And one of the key copywriting mistakes I see from non-marketers is that they cripple their response rates by leaving out essential parts of the sales message.    

Different marketers have different formulae, but here’s the basic 5-step approach I tend to take: 

• This is what I’ve got
• This is what it can do for you
• This is why you should get it from me
• This is why you should believe me
• This is how you can get it

It’s not cast in stone - as I said other copywriters have different steps - but it’s a great place to start. 

If you look at your own ads or your website homepage, does it have those elements? And does it have them in this order?

- Can the reader quickly see what the offer is? 

- Does it explain why he or she should buy from you instead of your competitors?

- Is there evidence that backs up the claims you make about your product or service?

- Is it obvious to the reader what he or she should do next?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, you’re probably letting a lot of money spill through your hands.  

Steve Gibson

When I’m talking about website marketing, I often talk about the importance of “visitor value”.

So, what is it?

Visitor value is the average income accrued by a business from bringing someone to their website.

It doesn’t just mean someone who makes a purchase during that visit, it can be the residual income you expect to generate from someone requesting information or signing up to a newsletter.

Anyway … earlier this week, I posted something on an internet discussion group where I said:

“… if you’ve got a low income per visitor, doesn’t that mean there’s something wrong with either your business model, the quality of your traffic or your website?

i.e. a business with a low income per visitor is a business in trouble.”

Some people seem to doubt this, so I thought I’d address the issue head on.

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