Posted by Deb on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 , Posted in Brand Marketing, charitable marketing, Clarity Posts, creativity, Featured, Reputation Management , 2 Comments »
Men’s Wearhouse’s 4th annual National Suit Drive, a charitable event bringing in professional clothes for donation to designated local charities that help get people back to work, officially kicked off Aug. 2nd as models clad only in underwear and a tie took to the sidewalks outside the company’s stores to attract attention and generate donations. There’s a lot to like about this event, besides the fact it helps out some folks who really need help. It’s a publicity stunt, event marketing and charitable giving all wrapped into one, offering some great lessons for companies of all sizes and budgets. Here are my top 5 ideas for replicating the best of this event for your organization.
1. Logical Ties.
No pun intended, honest. That Men’s Wearhouse would support charities that get working wardrobes to those who need them to get jobs makes perfect sense. I often talk to students about advice from Sunny Kobe Cook, who founded Sleep Country USA and pioneered a long-running charitable giving program they had to donate used mattresses to charities that refurbished them for battered women’s shelters. Not only was it supporting a worthy cause, Sleep Country’s mattress program took care of a customer problem — what to do with the old mattress? It removed a potential barrier to a new purchase. Sleep Country USA’s charity program now supports foster kids and includes a Pajama Bowl fundraiser.
Sunny once talked about having spoken at some business conference or another where she spoke to the owner of a closet system company. They’d followed her example and created a charitable program to coordinate clothing donations. They brought donation bags and the charity’s receipts with them, encouraged customers to sort through their clothes for pieces to donate while everything was piled on the bed to give them access to the closet, handed the customer a receipt before leaving and took care of delivering the donation on the customers’ behalves. The customer had work to do while the crew was installing the new system. They could feel good about supporting a local charity. And the new closet systems looked even more impressive with fewer items stored there! Smart!
2. Integrated into the Business.
Sunny advocated building charitable giving right into the business plan rather than writing donation checks. Why not write checks? What’s the first thing most of us cut when we have less money? Charitable giving. Just ask any nonprofit in any category how their donations have been going in the down economy. The mattress program was low-impact for Sleep Country just as the clothing donations were for the closet system company. Trucks left the warehouse full of huge and heavy boxes. They came back empty except for collapsed cardboard for recycling. The charities regularly picked up the donations at the company’s warehouse. The cost to the business? A bit of extra fuel and some square footage of warehouse space.
Not every company has trucks and warehouses to leverage in its charitable marketing program, but almost any sized company can find the logical ties and activity that engages customers, employees or both for a greater good. Countless companies organize teams for fundraising walks. Employees recruit friends and family to join them. The company prints tee-shirts emblazoned with their logo and the walk’s name and gives them to everyone walking. If the group stays together, they’ll be tough to miss as the shirts are read by other walkers and bystanders.
Corporate teams have been helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity nearly since the charity began. Big companies sponsor houses. Little ones can organize work crews as team off-sites. Brand building, team building and charitable marketing all at once.
3. Visual Impact.
This is the best part of Men’s Wearhouse’s program in my mind.
As you can see from this publicity image from the company, a key component of the National Suit Drive is the models working the sidewalks outside the stores. It’s tough to ignore a guy in his underwear, shoes and a tie on the sidewalk downtown. You can imagine all the people snapping pictures on cell phones, posting them all over the Internet and the conversations in the coffee shops and cafes all over town. Wednesday’s Seattle Times print edition had a photo on the front page of the local section. It’s that coveted word of mouth in action.
Years ago, when McDonald’s introduced McCafe, they did local market stunts with teams placing blocks of ice in public squares. Inside the blocks were frozen reusable McDonald’s coffee cups and inside those coupons to try the new coffees. Another stunt that got noticed on the street, got people talking and garnered traditional press coverage. If the people walking and driving by can’t help but notice, word of what you’re doing is likely to spread.
What ideas do you have?
Posted by Deb on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 , Posted in creativity, Environmental Marketing, Featured, Green Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Sustainability , No Comments »
Interesting story today courtesy of The New York Times on how primary through secondary students have performed on geography tests. I loved the Seattle Times’ headline for it as I thought it told the whole story: “Most students still lost on geography.” A Chicago Tribune sidebar offers a quiz to test each reader’s grasp of the subject, which I want you to go take! It demonstrates, among other things, that geography isn’t just about maps, but what’s happening in locations around the world.
When first out of college, marriage brought me to Upstate New York where I decided New York didn’t teach geography. “Iowa,” I’d answer when asked where I was from. “Oh, sure, potatoes,” was the response more often than you’d believe. Um, no, that’s Idaho, 1,400 miles further west. Oh well.
If you’re in the business of marketing clean tech products or advocating for environmental causes, you should care a lot if people in general and students in particular are geographically illiterate because it raises huge barricades to them understanding the story you’re telling.
An association of Italian cashmere sweater makers might subtly draw attention to the fact that demand for much cheaper Chinese cashmere has led to massive overgrazing which is turning swaths of China’s Alashan Plateau into desert. Shepherds are having to sell their goats because they’re starving. You can read more here if you’re interested. If consumers didn’t know China had massive grasslands and don’t grasp that overgrazing turns grasslands into desert, the Italian association has a much tougher story to tell.
A nonprofit encouraging different irrigation and farmland management practices might think they could leverage the massive Midwestern flooding to draw attention to their recommendations. But if the public a) don’t even realize we have huge rivers draining the massive center of the nation and b) can’t see the connection between land management and flooding and pollution, they have to start at square one to educate the public before they can get on with their real objective of affecting change.
As marketers look at how best to tell their story, they have to consider the basic level of understanding of the subject or issue around which they’ll be story telling. The old advice of “never assume” seems incredibly apropos. Apparently on even basic things like geography, we’d be wise to do a little research before setting strategy.
Do you know, for sure, what your target audience knows about the background they need to grasp your story?
Posted by Deb on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 , Posted in Clarity Posts, creativity, Featured, Social Media , No Comments »
Eloqua, a company that’s one of the best examples of how to smartly use great content to market your business, just published a new free social media ebook. Just click Social Media ProBook to download either a Web or PDF version.
Eloqua describes the new book, an update to their award-winning Social Media Playbook, which I wrote about in March in a Social Media Freebies post, as “a 42-page free e-book collaboratively written by a cross-section of social marketers from brands and agencies, analysts, and social support professionals across both business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries.”
Get the story behind the book at Eloqua’s blog. It’s fun.
Posted by Deb on Monday, June 27th, 2011 , Posted in Brand Strategy, Clarity Posts, creativity, Environmental Marketing, Featured, Marketing Strategy , 3 Comments »
Does the whole idea of “content marketing” scare you? Or are you wondering what the heck it even is? Then set those fears aside and pick up a copy of Content Rules by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and C.C. Chapman, founder of Digital Dads.
The book is chock full of smart recommendations from successful content marketers, detailed how to instructions and case studies complete with “Ideas Your Can Steal.” Narrowing the good ideas down to a handful to cover here was tough. I focused on recommendations I hadn’t read elsewhere or ones with an interesting new angle to sage advice. Nearly all of them have entire chapters dedicated to fleshing out the details. These are merely highlights.
1. Reimagine; Don’t Recycle
The gist of this chapter is summed up pretty well by a quote from social media consultant Jay Baer: “deconstruct that white paper and create an array of info snacks you can sprinkle across the Web, or package into smaller pieces of content.” I love that “info snacks” term. It isn’t about repurposing content you created, but creating a significant piece of content that merits breaking up into smaller pieces, each of which delivers value to your readers. Sort of like taking the subject of Entrepreneurial Marketing and carving it into 20 classes, I guess.
Among the examples is MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media Marketing Dec. ’09 research report. The 242-page survey of 5,140 marketers became a webinar, a major article, a number of smaller articles and blog posts and fodder for lots of publicity as others covered the report and the stats within it.
2. Don’t Write Case Studies; Tell Customer Success Stories
Don’t just demonstrate the value of your offering. Tell the story to overcome objections early in the buying cycle. “The keys,” write the authors, “are to tell a story the intended audience wants to hear and to tell it with one simple imperative in mind. It helps to think of them less as case studies, which sounds clinical and detached and bloodless, and more like customer success stories, which sounds human and connected.”
3. Make Over Your FAQs
“This is an online customer service center,” the authors state, and just like Customer Service, your FAQs should genuinely help. How? A few of their suggestions included:
- Write answers, not descriptions.
- Solve problems rather than shill services.
- Show some personality.
- Make the FAQ searchable
4. Speak Human!
Organizations should sound like they’re run by people, posit the authors. Speak in a conversational tone, with personality, empathy and true emotion. Be appropriate to your audience, of course. But take a stand. Your readers need to know where you’re coming from, or how you feel about a topic.
5. Ban Buzz Words
“They make us sound like Tools instead of humans.” Handley and Chapman composed a list of 18 buzz words to ban with a little help from their Twitter friends. On the list are loads of terms I know well from my tech PR days — such as “drill down,” “solution,” “incentivizing,” “users” and “best-of-breed.” I confess to being guilty of using several of their banded terms, not just in writing, but speech. I hereby resolve to stop that.
Instead, use the language your customers use. How do you know what that language is? Here’s a tip Handley and Chapman offered from Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Marketing in Minneapolis: “The language on social sites is like the canary in the coal mine. It can tell you an awful lot about your customers and how you can engage them.” Go see what language they’re using as they discuss your industry online.
Content Rules also contains a great, detailed list of 25 (and a half. They sneak in an extra) ideas of what to talk about when you think you have nothing to say. Among them is to “find a LinkedIn question you’d like to address and answer it; then invite your readers to offer their two pesos.”
Content Rules will definitely be on my class recommended reading list. Whether you’re trying to wrap your arms around how to use build your business or looking for ideas to give your blog a boost, they’re in here.
Ann and C.C., do you license reprints by the chapter?
Posted by Deb on Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 , Posted in Clarity Posts, creativity, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Featured , No Comments »
Last week, Brand Strategy Insider posted this great quiz you can take to see if you’re predominantly right- or left-brained. Managing Partner Derrick Daye wrote that there’s a battle waging in board rooms because management people tend to be left-brain thinkers: they are verbal, logical and analytical. Marketing people, on the other hand, tend to be right-brain thinkers: they are visual, intuitive and holistic. They come at a situation from totally different angles.
Having spent a lot of years convincing management teams to take all kinds of communications actions, even when their instincts wanted them to take the opposite approach, I could instantly relate to the problem they were discussing. The old adage about walking a mile in another “man’s” shoes sprung to mind.
Plus I love quizzes like this! I clicked the link and took it immediately. I scored 8 for left-brain and 12 for right-brain. I have to confess I’d have answered at least a couple of the questions differently just a few years ago when I was still an agency exec. As soon as I had my score, I promptly shared it with some folks to see how I compared with my design, marketing and communications pals.
At the same time as I came across this fun little gem via Twitter, I was digging in to grade 10 marketing plans written by my University of Washington undergraduate Entrepreneurial Marketing student teams; five each for two local entrepreneurships. About half of my students are studying marketing as a major. The rest are focused on entrepreneurship and their backgrounds can be anything from finance to comp sci. I watched this left-brain/right-brain thing play out in their teams all quarter and could see the results in their marketing plans.
My students endure a lot of conversation during the quarter about getting the critical importance of getting inside the customers’ or prospects’ heads to genuinely understand what they need and want and what would motivate them to buy. Apparently, some of them were listening, which is rewarding. This particular quiz for me is getting at the same point. Understand how the people you need to persuade — whether that be customer or client prospects, colleagues, managers, community members or funders — think and approach a problem and then adjust to come at it from their point of view. Walk a mile. You’re always going to be more successful.
After spending the morning looking at exactly this issue of what motivates prospects to buy as a team member and then getting my grades filed, my curiosity drove me to check for other quizes on this to see if I liked any others better. I found plenty targeting all kinds of different groups. Here’s one from Scholastic for teachers to help figure out how to reach every kind of learner. I should probably take that one, too. It’s not as if the only place we do that is in a classroom.
To do lists. That one of the things I would’ve had to check a few years ago. I still make them, but I’m no longer so good at paying attention to them if it’s not connected to a client or class deadline. Those “not urgent but important” activities from Covey’s quadrant. Wonder if my left-brain score would’ve been higher if I’d checked that. Maybe I’ll take it again.
Posted by Deb on Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 , Posted in Clarity Posts, creativity, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Environmental Marketing, Featured, Marketing Strategy, Product demos , No Comments »
Last week, I had a chance to attend the Speed Geek happy hour event held annually by Groundwire, a nonprofit tech consultancy that builds websites, databases, email and social media tools for environmental nonprofits. The evening is designed to help prospective clients get a taste of what this unique consultancy can do for them. Besides being fun, it was some of the best show-n-tell I’ve seen. And a tremendous demonstration of the power that comes from having your customers sell you. It’s like putting your case studies and website testimonials on steroids.
Groundwire had eight stations throughout their offices, six of which were customers talking about what Groundwire had done for them. Groundwire used the other two to show off a big sustainable municipalities project in development and to showcase a new product from Groundwire Labs, their R&D unit.
It was speed dating for groups. Each station had just five minutes to show their stuff and the presentations were tight. It’s one thing to drive your own staff to do demos like that, it’s another all together to ask clients to do it. But they did and they were great.
Not every organizations could use speed dating to showcase their capabilities, but most could find ways to make their demos more fun and feel more like show-n-tell. I kept picturing trade show and conference customer and prospect events where something like it would have been great.
In Word of Mouth Marketing, Andy Sernovitz writes that the medium for word of mouth marketing is real people. You just need to find the right people to carry your message. The obvious ones are happy customers. But they’re not the only ones.
There’s a great story I love relaying in classrooms and board rooms alike from Jay Conrad Levinson’s 1998 book Guerrilla Marketing about a new restauranteur who who tapped into an extremely well connected set of neighborhood talkers: hairdressers. Take a second to picture your last hair cut and you’ll immediately see the brilliance in this idea. Before the restaurant officially opened, the owner invited the local hairdressers to a big preview dinner party. He took no shortcuts, serving his top menu items and pouring his best wines and making sure his invited guests had a great time. Show-n-tell. You know those hairdressers talked for weeks about that party to every single client. If I’m remembering correctly, the hairdressers left the restaurant that evening with discount coupons to share with their clients. Good old fashioned tracking mechanism.
I always show one of the Will It Blend videos from BlendTec in class because a) I love them and b) they’re an excellent example of how to bring drama and humor to a product demo. It’s a great ROI case study for entrepreneurial marketing, too.
Got any new ideas to demonstrate your value to prospects?
Posted by Deb on Friday, April 8th, 2011 , Posted in Clarity Posts, creativity, Featured , No Comments »
I’m a big believer in creativity breaks. One of my favorites on a sunny day is a loop walk to Seattle’s Alki Beach. Happy Friday, everyone. Go re-create!
