Category Archives: Marketing

Communications, Marketing

5 Ways To Be Strategic with Data

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In business we look at the information we gather from things like surveys, buying habits, polls and online activity to learn preferences, find trends and spot opportunities.  The information we gather acts as building blocks for everything from marketing campaigns to product development, but I sometimes wonder if we are outsmarting ourselves.  All of the data in the world isn’t going to deliver results if we aren’t also employing an effective strategy or if you prefer, creative thinking to our actions.

A few years ago Kathleen Wynne, the former premier of Ontario, participated in Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) forum.  No doubt she was attempting to get in touch with a younger demographic and take advantage of a popular social media channel to do it.  The data said that the medium would not only put her in touch with the right audience but it’s “hip” factor might also give her a boost in the polls. The audience and the medium were right – the challenge, of course, was the message. 

Ms. Wynne’s team understood the popularity of the medium but seemed to miss the mark on the nature of it. Rather than embracing the “ask me anything” forum and the consequent, “answer everything” that it implied, Ms. Wynne delivered prepared answers or no answers at all.  Participants were unimpressed. The event consequently had the opposite effect from what was intended. To put it succinctly, the Reddit engagement was a fail. But then anyone who has actually been on Reddit could have told the planners that it was the wrong place to be if you weren’t comfortable in being completely open (and possibly embarrassing yourself). Not exactly the inclination of politicians of any stripe.

Data is a tool; it cannot replace careful strategy, thoughtful engagement or a creative approach to solving communications challenges.  You can achieve amazing numbers on your “Twitter feed” and thousands of “likes” on your Facebook account and still see no appreciable difference in sales if you are not also thinking about the wants and needs of your clients. If all you want is “likes” on your Facebook account, run contests with good prizes, buy Google and Facebook ads, engage popular bloggers to review and promote your services or products. Change it up and do it again.  But if you want to get people engaged on your issue or invested in your products or services, then you’re going to have to be more strategic.

1.    Expose Yourself to New Thinking: Read, listen and engage in conversations that are outside of your field.  Ideas that are tried and true in one area are often fodder for new discoveries in another.  Multitasking is actually quite useful in this instance.  When you are working on different projects your mind is obliged to shift gears frequently, keeping it active, but it also means that the thinking you apply to solve problems in one area may lend you additional strength to solve problems in another.

2.    Take The Unexpected Seriously: When strange or unanticipated outcomes occur, investigate them.  Find out why they happened. For example, when retailers realized that their shopper profiling data was having an unexpected negative impact, they investigated and found that their coupons and targeted ads were so accurate they actually creeped out shoppers. Rather than making shoppers feel that their needs were being addressed, they made them feel as though their privacy was being violated. To reduce the creep factor retailers began to introduce unrelated content.  For example, new moms would get coupons for diapers and other baby paraphernalia, but they would also get lawnmower ads and tire specials. This made the coupons useful, but also feel less personally directed.

3.    Learn From Success: Seek out and work with people who are doing good things or have been successful in the past.  Study their methods and determine if their approach can be used to achieve successful results for you. The Pancreatic Cancer Action organization recently ran an ad campaign with the tagline, “I wish I had breast cancer.” Understandably the ad generated a fair bit of outrage and shock.  It also garnered an unprecedented amount of attention towards pancreatic cancer that resulted in the head of the organization giving numerous interviews in the UK, U.S. and Canada. In those interviews, the issues facing those with the disease were discussed at length. Similar shock approaches were used in the early days of Aids research and consequently generated millions of dollars in research.

4.    Take Advantage of Existing Opportunities: When the cashier at Mac Donald’s asks you if you would like fries with your order, that’s a perfect example of taking advantage of an existing opportunity. A similar approach would be looking to existing clients to expand business opportunities.

5.    Turn a Negative into a Positive: In December of 2011, Alec Baldwin was removed from an American Airlines flight after he refused to stop playing a game. The flight was delayed and significant coverage followed. Baldwin could have apologized to the airline for causing the flight to be delayed, but he took a different approach.  Shortly after the event and amid the media stories he appeared on Saturday Night Live and posed as the pilot of the flight.  In that guise, he delivered an apology to himself and a humorous and mocking skit that garnered him praise for being a savvy PR pro.  The skit also made American Airlines look petty and foolish.

Keep in mind that being creative or strategic is an act of will. There are no quick and easy answers. Creative people work at it.  They think hard and try out ideas, hundreds of them if not more before they hit upon those that work.

Have you ever stumbled upon a great idea in an unexpected place? How do you get yourself into a strategic frame of mind?

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Communications, Government Relations, Marketing

Warming Up The Audience Before Delivering Your Message

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Regardless of the setting, whether I’m leading a workshop, lobbying or speaking at an event, I always warm up my audience before delivering my message. When they’re warm, I’m hot.

A Story from the Field

The CEO of the large pharmaceutical company was anxious to meet with an Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM).  His company had considerable concerns around a regulatory process and he wanted to share their proposals towards addressing that challenge.  He knew that in the weeks prior to his meeting there had been quite a bit of bad press about the ADM’s program. What’s more, the bad press was the result of accusatory comments levelled directly at the ADM by another pharmaceutical company.  It was of little surprise to the CEO when he was only granted 30 minutes for the meeting, and even less of a surprise when 30 minutes was reduced to 15 minutes once he arrived.

Rather than launching into his proposal, he started the meeting by explaining that he understood the challenges the department faced.  He explained that he thought the press coverage unfair since it did nothing to contribute to an open dialogue between his industry and the department.  The ADM who had started the meeting with her hands folded across her chest and her lips tightly pursed, slowly began to relax.  When her assistant came into the meeting to get her after 15 minutes, the ADM shook her head and the meeting proceeded. By the time the CEO explained that his company funded a group of independent scientists who would be available for an exchange program with the department due to their specialized knowledge, 45 minutes had elapsed. The ADM was leaning forward attentively and asking how the scientists were chosen and how the exchange might work. The meeting ended after an hour and there were smiles all around.

As government relations exercises go, I have rarely been so impressed with a client for turning what could have been a disaster into a triumph. When we were told we had 15 minutes I wasn’t sure if he would stay or walk out, but he was made of sterner and smarter stuff.  It’s a lesson that has stayed with me.

Four tips for managing first meetings:

  • Do your homework. Understand what challenges and opportunities face your audience.
  • Assume nothing about your audience’s knowledge of you; make sure your position/attitude is clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting.
  • Read the body language of the person you are meeting with and respond to it.
  • Establish rapport before trying to deliver your pitch.

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Marketing, public relations

The Power and Pain of Polling

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In North America, we poll on anything we can imagine. From toilet paper preferences to preferred political leaders. We poll and poll and use those results to make a host of decisions.  Most of us either believe that polling results are completely useless or absolutely insightful. Sometimes they are both. After all, an insight into how I feel about something today is not necessarily an indicator of how I will behave tomorrow.  So we poll again tomorrow to see if the answer has changed and if it has, we poll again in an attempt to determine what influenced that change.

The concept of public opinion as we understand it was first coined by French Foreign Affairs Secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1774 and American newspapers started using polling techniques in the 1820s.  However, polling in Canada didn’t really take root until the 1960’s.  In 1959 the Quebec Liberal Party first used a poll to determine their election strategy for the 1960 election; by 1965 Canadian newspapers were well engaged in the practice of polling.  Today, newspapers and political parties are strong adherents to the power of polling and most polling companies have an affiliation with either a newspaper or a political party.  There is of course polling related to commercial ventures.  These are lucrative activities and dominate the polling landscape.  If you own a business, sell a product or service you’ve probably conducted polls of your own or reviewed existing polls about your customers, market or sector.

Despite the popularity of polling, there are always questions about the accuracy of polls.   The methodology is often called into question if companies conducting similar polls get significantly different results.  These differences are a reflection of the quality, tone and tenure of the questions asked.  The answers are also influenced by who was asked.  After all, if you were to poll a riding that has strong conservative roots, you are unlikely to obtain results that support Liberals and vice-versa.

In May 2013, folks in British Columbia were surprised to discover that they still had a Liberal government after the votes were counted in their provincial election.  Their surprise and that of the pundits and pollsters came because polls had been clear that the New Democratic party was well in the lead.

 “I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour.

I’ve never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.”

Erma Bombeck, U.S. Humourist

More recently we saw shock move across the U.S. and the world when Donald Trump became the president of the United States. One pollster had been so certain of Hilary Clinton’s win that he had offered to eat a bug if he was wrong.  One of the most popular approaches or survey techniques is to randomly select individuals and ask them a series of carefully crafted questions.  The questions are generally created to avoid bias in the answer. The responses are then tabulated and reported on. While there are a number of ways of gathering information, the thing to consider when you look at polls is that no amount of data regardless of how accurately gathered will be worthwhile unless you can interpret results accurately.  In effect, if the act of polling is a science, then the analysis of polls is an art.  The ability to not only interpret but achieve insight into how respondents are likely to react is what makes good polling companies worth their weight in gold.

If you are unclear about what I mean, consider the difference between two questions:

  • Do most Canadians want their elected officials to behave in a decorous fashion?
  • Do most Canadians expect their elected officials to behave in a decorous fashion?

Although the questions appear to be almost identical, they will likely elicit completely different responses. What Canadian’s want and what they expect to get can be completely different things.  Do you want your kids to listen to everything you say?  Do you expect them to listen to everything you say?  Understanding these distinctions is what real pollsters bring to the table.

What do you think about polling? Do you pay attention to polls?  Do you participate in them?

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Communications, Marketing

Marketing Attitude

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Marketing Attitude, what story is your brand telling?

It was my third day of business travel and I was tired but looking forward to a seminar on motivation. About halfway through the presentation, I realized that the longer I stayed the more demotivated I felt. The speaker was engaging,  she was actually quite funny, but her material was dated. My table-mates were a bigger problem. They were unhappy co-workers. Their underlying unpleasantness towards each other and their missing colleagues was tangible. It was disrespectful at best and openly hostile at other times. Made me glad I didn’t work with them and wonder if their boss understood the brand they created.

I left the session after an hour and ended up in a conflict resolution lecture. I’ve rarely laughed so hard. It was clever, insightful and I can say without a doubt, conflict has never felt so good. The rest of my day unfolded in a pleasant fashion, but as I was reflecting on the morning’s adventures I couldn’t help wondering about how attitudes, our own, those of service providers and even other customers influence and affect how we perceive brands.

While I was waiting for the conflict resolution lecture to start the woman ahead of me in line gave me a big smile, she turned out to be the lecturer. Her smile was an accurate indicator of the attitude she conveyed throughout her lecture. It reminded me of a study I read on the effects of greetings on shoppers, no not the typical Wal-Mart greeting, but a real greeting, like, “Hi, is it still raining out?” for mall shoppers. The study indicated that shoppers are more likely to report a positive experience if they are greeted and told goodbye. So although they may have a neutral journey through a store, the emotion they experience on coming and going will dictate their impressions.

Of course, the customer’s attitude before they enter a store or a website will also influence their experience. Had I been in a cranky mood when I started the first lecture, I doubt I would have lasted 15 minutes. I also wondered about the experience of customers going into the store of my original tablemates. I couldn’t help but think that their office dynamics would make for an unpleasant environment. Their dislike of each other would dominate the atmosphere, not exactly conducive to a positive retail experience.

So many elements are at play when a brand is being experienced that we constantly have to ask ourselves, what am I’m doing contribute to my brand? Even when we are being vigilant we can get into trouble. On my way home I was standing at airport security waiting to be scanned when one of the security personnel walked up to her colleague and reprimanded him for complaining about something in front of passengers. I wonder what she thought her reprimand in front of me was doing for customer relations? Marketing attitude is something we have to be thinking about all the time. Marketing the wrong attitude can have such a lasting impression, that no matter how good the product, people will be reluctant to engage. The same can be said about marketing the right attitude; it can carry you through even the most unforgiving lapses.

Tips on Managing Brand

  • Your attitude is your brand, make sure that you are conveying the right messages.
  • Employees are your brand ambassadors.  Their attitudes, likes and dislikes will play into your brand and how your services or products are perceived. Make sure you are properly aligned.
  • You cannot control your customer’s attitudes, but you can ensure that you are not contributing to a negative experience. Manage the atmosphere you are responsible for and the rest will follow.

Have you had an unpleasant experience work out because the attitude was right or perhaps the reverse is true? Have you had any great experiences that came as a result of great attitude?

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Marketing Attitude

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