If your organization is like many others out there, you need to make the most of your time and your marketing budget. These days it’s all about doing more with less. Here are a few of the easiest ways to save time and money throughout the creative process.

1. Allow Proper Timing: Plan Ahead

Nothing sucks effectiveness out of a project like not having enough time to get it done well. Getting a truly effective, creative solution and well-thought out end product is a process of research and exploration and does take an investment of time. By allowing adequate time for market research and creative development, you’ll end up with far more effective and creative projects.

With adequate timelines, your possibilities are far more open and budget friendly. Short cutting this process dramatically impacts the research and creative exploration process and consequently your end product suffers. With tight timelines, your project is limited to what can be accomplished in the limited time allowed. Planning ahead will result in you getting more impact and value out of the creative process – better results for your investment. Continue reading →

Where part two of this series focused on how the various companies cited in the study as being perceived to value position themselves within the mind of their various audiences, this article focuses on what other businesses can learn from these to companies to communicate value to their audiences.

A curious finding in the M/A/R/C and Integer Group study on the value brands found that value did not necessarily mean high quality at a low price. To the contrary, it found that respondents defined value as a good quality at a fair or reasonable price. In fact, those respondents who define value as quality at a fair or reasonable price were more than twice as many as those who defined it as getting the best quality for the least money (13% compared to 6%). Continue reading →

The M/A/R/C and Integer study on the top value brands included the likes of Walmart, Target, Sony and Kellogs. However, most companies can’t match the spending power of those listed in the M/A/R/C  and Integer study. In fact, each of those companies likely has an annual advertising budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars if not more. While the second in this series focused on using positioning as a strategy to build value, this article focuses on how companies without billion-dollar budgets can communicate that value to their audiences.

The communication of value is where the real trick lies. After all, Target didn’t get to be known for designer quality on a budget by getting lucky or stumbling upon something that worked. Effective communication of value is a product of three things: positioning, effective communication strategies and audience touch points. While the concept of positioning was covered in the second of this series, this article explores the latter two.

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When I was young, a novel product called Magic Eye came out — everyone wanted one. No magic was actually involved, Magic Eye was just a book that contained hidden images the appeared when you stared at the image on a page long enough.  At first glance the pages of the book seemed to contain nothing but jumbled-up crap, but then when you stared long enough a whale or jet plane might appear — like MAGIC.

Staring at the pages of a Magic Eye was fun for a little while, but I eventually tired of it. Nowadays I would rather not stare at something for more than 5 seconds in order to figure it out. This includes any type of positioning, branding or, advertising.

An analysis of 901 brands by the Eureka! Ranch(1) showed that brands that touted an obvious benefit were 75% more likely to succeed than those that hide their message.

The ears and eyes of your prospects are being pushed and pulled in a lot of directions by all the other advertising out there. Being upfront and concise as to how your product is a benefit will help you push through the clutter more than being super avant garde or idiotic. Continue reading →

Value is something that is perceived. It is not a product feature or physical thing and it happens in the mind of the prospect or customer. This makes it hard to plan for. However, the companies listed in the aforementioned article have done this. This part of the article series will focus on how these value brands have positioned themselves in the minds of their prospects and customers in a way that maximizes value perception.

A review of positioning

I annoy my wife with a game I call “Will they make it?” We play it when we are driving around town. The objective of the game is to spot a new or old business and discern whether that business will make it or not. Judgments are based on previous knowledge, location, facilities, outdoor signage, anecdotal evidence, and so forth. If we deem that a particular business will not make it, we have to give our best guess as to how long it will take that business to die.

We have been wrong and right with our predictions, but the fundamental question we try to answer is: What does (insert business name) mean?

This is the fundamental question of positioning: What does your company mean? Continue reading →

One of the best marketing tactics you can use is to be first to the market. Being first to the market will help you sell more and simplify your marketing efforts.

It is a well known fact that the second product to the market will achieve on average 71% of the sales of the pioneer product. Never heard this before? Now you have. Many products are considered successful with about 5% of the pioneer product’s sales. I’m thinking about Apple and their OS.

Being first to the market is perhaps the most important thing you can do to help your business sell more of whatever you are selling. But there can be only one pioneer, right? The rub here is that pioneer products do not have ultimate dominion over an entire product category. Continue reading →

How many times has a sales person tried to sell you something that you don’t need? This is not only annoying, it’s bad salesmanship. I have been stopped by cellphone salesmen at the mall while I was talking on a cellphone. Is common sense dead?

Good marketers and sales people are educators not annoying cellphone sales people. Studies have shown that a prospect’s intent to by and ultimate purchase of a product increase as the prospect learns more about the product. This flies in the face of the traditional notion that consumers make their minds up quickly, like within seconds, and do not want more information than “necessary.” Continue reading →

Now that we are all savvy on what meaningless and marketing are and why they are bad, let’s take a look at the solution: Meaningful Marketing.

Meaningful marketing is smart marketing. It is based on the real benefit of your product or service and how that suits the need of prospective customers. It is not based on deception, gimmicks, shock, or impulse. You cannot fool a prospect into making a meaningful decision. Continue reading →

A recent study published by the Integer Group and M/A/R/C Research (as cited by Straczynksi 2009) listed what they refer to as “top value” brands. Those brands that made the list included those most frequently cited by approximately 20,000 respondents as delivering value as well as those perceived to deliver the most value within their respective product categories. Wal-Mart topped the list, being named most frequently as offering value with 18 percent. Target (10 percent), Sony (nine percent), Kroger (five percent), and Kellogg’s (five percent) also featured prominently as top value brands.

Although published findings confirm that which we already suspected, they beget a series of other questions that deserve exploration. For example, what does value mean and how can that be translated to help other businesses? How did some of these companies come to be perceived as providing value? Does that value translate into success and on what levels? After all, these companies are not necessarily the cheapest vendor within their product categories.

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Brandt Andersen, owner of the Utah Flash, an NBA D-League team, thought it would be fun to have Micheal Jordan and Bryon Russell play a game of one-on-one during halftime of a Flash game on December 7th. Andersen reportedly offered $100,000 the winner’s charity of choice. Sounds like a good idea right? The only problem is that Michael Jordan never agreed to participate in the event.

In an attempt to be creative and viral the Flash’s marketing team decided to hire a Jordan look-a-like to loaf around the greater Orem-Provo area in order to drum up attention. This idea would have been far from iron clad even if Jordan had agreed to come, but the fact that they planned on pulling of this stunt whether he planned on coming our not reaches new heights of mindlessness and absurdity. Continue reading →