Back to Basics: Three Things a Marketer Should Never Forget

Toward his honorable discharge from service and in pursuit of his second career, a colonel is interviewed for a CEO job in a large corporation.

"Why do you think you fit the job?" he is asked.

"I have all the relevant experience because running this company is just like commanding my brigade: You have employees, I had soldiers; you call it a stock room - we called it logistics; your HR is just another name for our adjutancy; we compete with the other units in the command just as you deal with your competitors!"

"OK,” says the interviewer, "How about the customer?"

"The customer?" retorts the colonel after three seconds of thinking, "he's the enemy!"

The Moral: FOCUS IS EVERYTHING

A discussion on LinkedIn’s Marketing Executives Group), started by Dr. Brian Monger, CEO at Marketing Association of ANZ in Melbourne, Australia, addresses this and other core marketing issues that sometimes we forget.

Monger posed the question: “How do you know when someone really doesn’t understand marketing?” What are the primary indicators - in your experience?” That discussion has drawn more than 300 comments to date. I’ve taken some of the best answers and turned them into three questions marketers should ask themselves on a regular basis.

1. When was the last time I listened to my customers?
People who’ve worked in the same industry for several years, often start to take it for granted. They’ve done the focus groups, the talking to members and customers and conducted satisfaction survey and needs analysis just the way they are supposed to. But are you really on top of what your customer needs. Let’s do a little self-examination here:
• Do you dislike visiting plants, stores, meetings or talking to customers?
• Do you talk with all the different departments in your organization that are connected to marketing on a regular basis – advertising, member services, web developers, social media experts, etc?
• Do you listen to what internal employees are telling you and act on their feedback?
• Do you read discussions on your LinkedIn, Face book and other social media pages, as well as tweets on your industry, and bring important information to your attention?

2. Is my marketing plan integrated across all the different parts of the mix?
There’s a big difference between marketing that creates opportunities, and sales which transform those opportunities into making money for the organization.
In my experience, marketing often begins before advertising, public relations and outreach. Many organizations decide to hire a communications or marketing firm after they’ve just redone their web site. This is a clear indicator that they don’t understand integrated marketing.

While many companies have a marketing plan, it does not account for every as Ogilvy & Mather puts it “touch point” by which an organization reaches its customers. As a result, branding is fragmented across different target audiences, and cohesive messages on what a company stands for and the value of its products or services aren’t always delivered.

The MEG members pointed out many times, that they know immediately that someone doesn’t understand marketing when they start talking about elements of the mix, without an overall strategy that drives the work.

Some of the comments on lack of integration and branding were:
• Marketers need to go back sometimes and remember the brand we have tried to build. A brand is a promise. To foster loyalty, it always has to deliver on the promise.
• Elements of marketing work together – it’s a unique blend of art and science.
• So many marketing departments continue to not connect a marketing activity to metrics and not tie it to a business goal.
• When they use words interchangeably such as marketing, sales, promotion, PR, publicity, etc ... without regard to context.

3. Do we have a clearly articulated marketing strategy and a flexible plan?
I’ve worked for marketers who had a clearly articulated marketing plan – and didn’t want to pay to develop one. But the plan resided in their heads which doesn’t leave much for those who are expected to implement it. Basically it was this is what we need to do, and this is how we’re going to do it. Then the rest was about sales, sales, sales.

Perhaps the best purpose of a clearly articulated strategy and plan is involving everyone who must implement it during development, and obtaining buy-in as you go.

One marketer reports, he used to have a sign hanging on his door that said, Just because you have always done it that way doesn't mean it is right (pictured underneath was a man getting run over by a bull at the running of the bulls in Spain). He reports, there are so many aspects to successful marketing: knowing what works and applying it, knowing when a practice doesn't apply anymore and being open-minded enough to look for new approaches to getting in front of your target audience.

(A version of this article was published by ASAE's Marketing Insights, March 2011, written by yours truly).

6 Warning Signs a PR Firm is Not What it Seems

There are a lot of bad PR people out there, as there are in any industry. If you are trying to hire a PR agency and notice any of these issues run like hell.

1. A Room with a beautiful view – I had a colleague who was convinced PR agencies used the same tactic as pharmaceuticals - hire a lot of young, beautiful women to sell their products and services, because let's face it the majority of doctors are still men. There are some extremely bright and attractive young people in the PR business. But PR is also famous for bait and switch. If the agency gray hairs do all the talking in a room and you have a handful of young, very attractive people who only say a few scripted remarks, chances are those are your new account executives. Ask how many vice presidents the PR agency has who are under 30? That’s a good way to check what’s really going on.

2. That’s a brilliant idea – You’re not hiring a PR agency to tell you what you want to hear. If your ideas are so great you would just implement them yourself, right. I had a boss once who would sit in a room with our CEO and repeat back exactly what he’d said a few minutes earlier in different words, and glow when he praised her. She had grown up in a Fortune 500 company, and was very good at it, but if you were paying attention you would notice she had nothing to say.

3. We know him, her and every journalist in your field and they take our calls This person is lying. Media has gone through so many upheavals in the past few years that no one knows everyone anymore. Name dropping in my opinion, is just obnoxious, unless it is done very sparingly and only to emphasize something you are already saying. Fortunately we live in the age of easy search – get a client list and Google recent stories about some of their biggest clients. Ask for the Today Show or evening news clips, articles about their clients by the famous columnist they know well, and that NPR story they are so proud of.

4. An outdated web site – If the PR company you are talking too has case studies from 10 years ago, no video or visuals, inactive social media spaces, no blog or a just plain outdated web site run like the wind. I've heard the excuse I'm too busy to redo my site many times but you know what, we're in an image business. Your web site is your image as are your social media spaces. What matters is the quality and currency of the information they put out there. We live in a very fast moving world and if the PR company hasn’t updated their look, materials, etc. they don’t live in it. What kind of message does old stuff send to a potential client?

5. You don’t need media training – Everyone needs media training before starting a campaign, no matter how big their ego or how many interviews they’ve done. I had a client once who used the exact same quote in every interview he did, and thought he sounded young, hip and brilliant. There are benefits to sticking to your messages but he came off as having only one thing to say which when you searched his interviews didn’t make him look very smart. The media training doesn’t have to be a full-blown, multi-tiered, many thousands of dollars deal, but at the very least – no matter how small the budget is – new messaging and mock interviews are really important.

6. Our expertise and role in the formation and dissemination of messages to all stakeholders is of value across the spectrum of traditional media as well as increasingly called upon by numerous new media options. English please? This lovely sentence came off the web site of one of the biggest PR agencies in the world. There are just way too many people out there that hide behind big empty words that don’t tell you anything about them. Many people are comfortable with that, it sounds like they write I guess. But the fact is if you can’t tell me your point of difference, then you don’t have one.

Women Still Earning 75% of What Men Do - This is about PR

When I was in my mid-20s, I worked with a guy who is now a big shot writer. I can't remember how, but I learned that he was making substantially more than I was doing the same job. At that time, I thought it was because he was a much better negotiator. His strategy was to walk in and tell them what salary he expected to earn, then let them negotiate him down. I had taken what they gave me and negotiated that up slightly.

This happened at another company too and it was done because the men were supporting families and the women were considered secondary wage earners. Well when I got divorced I was no longer a secondary anything. I am raising the kids, paying a pretty hefty mortgage and still getting underpaid.

The bottom line is the workplace still doesn't value women the way it does men. We also need to push harder for equal wages and know what the disparities are before we start talking about salary.

Right now, no one wants to push too hard because the line behind them stretches so far back that the organization will find someone else male or female who will take less.

But we still shouldn't let people take advantage of us when it comes to fees and salaries. And we still do.

All of this leads up to some new data that documents over the past 20 years women have still not reached parity with what their male counterparts earn for the same positions. This information is for PR people - which should put all of us females on notice.

Bey-Ling Sha, Ph.D. chairs PRSA’s National Committee on Work, Life & Gender and she published this article recently on LinkedIn. I thought it was important enough for all of us to give it more distribution.

The White House this month released a report showing that women still only earn about 75 percent of what men earn on the job. I feel disgusted but unsurprised.

Women have earned less than men since the government began tracking these numbers. In 1979, a woman earned 62 cents for every dollar earned by a man. In 2005 and 2006, women made 81 cents for every dollar men made. That was the all-time high!

In the last half decade, we’ve not only failed to make progress on the issue of gendered income inequity—we’ve increased the wage gap between men and women.

The public relations profession is not immune to this larger societal problem.

Preliminary data from the Public Relations Society of America’s 2010 Work, Life & Gender Survey indicated that the average annual income for men in public relations was about $120K; that figure for women was about $72K. In our 2006 survey, the average annual income for men was $98,188.82; the average for women was $67,853.08.

This income disparity is a problem for the public relations profession. Here’s why:

1. The problem appears to be getting worse. In 2006, the average income for women in public relations was 69 percent of men’s average earnings. In 2010, the figure was down to 60 percent. This widening wage gap is discouraging, not only for women practitioners, but also for the increasing number of households that rely on women as the primary wage-earner.

2. The percentage of women practitioners in public relations is increasing, not decreasing. This means that, as more women enter public relations with their lower annual earnings, the average incomes for the profession as a whole will decrease. This is a simple issue of math.

3. The profession may lose talent. As average incomes for the public relations profession decline, we may see talented practitioners move to other, related fields with higher salary offerings. This is a more complicated issue of competitiveness for our profession as a whole.


Of course, preliminary data are just that—preliminary.

This year, members of the Work, Life & Gender Committee will be doing some detailed analysis of the survey data. Perhaps the income differential is due to differences between men and women in years of experience or education levels. Perhaps it’s because more women than men are working part-time. Perhaps it’s because women’s careers get interrupted by child bearing and other family responsibilities. Perhaps.

Of course, past research has indicated that—even with all these possible explanations controlled and accounted for—women in public relations still earn less than men. But perhaps this will be the year the data show us a different picture.

If so, I will be totally surprised, but totally not disgusted.

USA Today Writer Reminds Us What PR Person Should Do Before an Interview

Went to a lunch presentation yesterday about what is really Off the Record and came away reinforcing my opinion that nothing is. The conversation was set up by Ed Barks who is a well-known media trainer in DC and given at a Capitol Communicators' Group lunch. Ed gave definitions for each of the terms – OTR, deep background, not for attribution, etc. If it’s a writer you know really well and trust you could go OTR, but I would still recommend that a client not do it.

In this age of social media you can develop messages for clients and coach them, but reporters are smart and they know how to manipulate people. I know, I was one. I think it’s better to take the approach that anything you say will be made public. That way you’ll be more careful.

The most interesting presentation was by Donna Leinwand, a justice and crime reporter for USA Today. She reminded us that what your client says isn’t everything. Good reporters notice details and will write about them.

Think about where the interview is taking place, who escorts the reporter out of the building, and those final moments when everyone is relaxed and more likely to say something they don’t want too. Also remember you should be careful of the follow-up questions, sent by email or delivered by phone.

Here are a few of the PR faux pas that Donna mentioned:

• A senior executive was wearing mismatched socks and she put it into her profile of him. He called her up after it ran and was furious.

• If you don’t want people to know you smoke don’t do it. Another senior executive chomped on a cigar throughout an entire interview and then his wife called Donna after the piece ran complaining that he was trying to quit and she shouldn’t have written that.

• Donna interviewed a DEA official along with a Rolling Stone reporter in Amsterdam at a local coffee house (translation legal dispenser of marijuana). The Rolling Stone reporter lit up a joint and she mentioned it in her copy. As you can imagine, the DEA official was beside himself.

• Clear your desk or conference room table before an interview. I used to read everything on a CEO’s desk as he was talking – and yes it was all upside down.

Marketing 3.0 - Bring Back Real Creativity and Concise Messaging

Sometimes I am just astounded by how little attention is paid to messaging in presentations, brochures and other marketing efforts. At how many times I’ve seen the same pitch or argument repackaged with a different colored bow and called insight or "brand new."

Maybe it’s my advertising background, maybe it was the Harvard Business School, maybe it’s from journalism or perhaps it has come from years of trying to distill from what a client says and the materials they produce, what it is they are really trying to tell me. What is uniquely theirs that will make me buy from them or go to their event.

No matter what the source, in this age of messages flung at us with words, visuals, in emails – we all need clarity of vision, originality and most important simplicity.

There’s an ongoing discussion on one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to asking the question “How do you know when someone really doesn’t understand marketing?”
Well my answer is when they can’t sell me on three concise messages that tell me why I should care about their product, service or event, why it's different than everything else out there and give me compelling reasons why I should go out and buy it.

So for what it’s worth here are some examples of what I’ve seen lately from very smart people who could do much, much better.

1. Presentation that was a jumble of bullets – I went to a speech by a senior executive recently that was a PowerPoint presentation of pure bullets. Not a single visual emphasized a point – actually there were a couple of photos of the executive interacting with kids jammed in the middle somewhere. It was a total jumble of we’ve done this, this, this, and so much more but it’s your job to figure out exactly what that means. The three messages I took away? The executive supports a discipline he believes in, his organization is throwing gobs of money at improving it and forming a lot of committees none of which I really get or seem to have accomplished much.

2. Brochure whose title and graphic didn't market to the right audience. – This was a missed opportunity. The cover of a brochure is supposed to send me strong messages about why I should continue reading. This one basically announced its purpose and then had a colorful visual that would be very attractive to young children. Yet the brochure was aimed at senior marketing executives – people who would pony up a lot of money to support a non-profit that helps kids. It was a good reminder of a basic marketing premise - know your audience and remember what they care about and will motivate them. Use a visual and words that reinforce a message that will make them take notice.

3. Assuming your audience understands everything about your business.

I was reading an online brochure the other day that had many nice pictures and jumbles of text – about a product that is fairly new.

The trouble was it threw a ton of information at me telling me how successful the product launch was, and also informing me that the new and improved version would be even better. But there was so much data it gave me a headache. You could tell it was written by more than one person and the writers couldn't decide what was important so they just threw in everything they could think of. There were also lists and lists of events attached to the product with no explanations of what they were. Let’s go back to what I was told over and over as a young journalist which also applies directly to marketing. Don’t assume that your reader knows what you’re talking about. Explain your products or services as you would to a novice.

4. Event with incredibly compelling title that delivered none of what it promised – I went to this panel discussion because it had very impressive people talking and a great title that sold me – combining health care reform with another issue I care about. The trouble was I watched three speeches none of which addressed the title. It wasn’t even really referenced in what they said. I’m finding this happens more and more lately. People have figured out that a sexy headline draws traffic. Yippee. What they haven’t figured out is how to deliver on it.

Those of us who’ve seen “The Social Network” know that the Internet has become a repository for taking the ideas of others and changing the thought or example slightly – and pretending they are ours. What passes as creativity these days often comes from what Mark Zuckerberg got sued over - intellectual property theft. Of course most people don't sue, they may not even know their work was taken.

I cannot tell you how many blogs I read where someone is pontificating about a brilliant “new” idea, that I read 20 years ago, expressed in different words by a past guru who has long since retired to his or her own private island.

Once it’s online, everything is considered fair game. But what about real creativity – the kind that takes your breath away it’s so fresh and original? Can’t we have that back? In broadcast, if it weren’t for HBO, Showtime and some independent films I would believe that creativity is no longer possible.

So my point in all of this is we live in a very complicated world and are barraged daily with far more than we can process. As marketers, and communicators, we should be long past the days where an information dump is how we sell. Everything we say and write in our outreach efforts should be straightforward, clear and ours because if it’s not our products and services become a rehash of everything else that’s out there. And especially in these tough economic times - I need compelling reasons why I should listen, care and buy whatever it is you are selling.

There's a Gunman in the Building: How Discovery Communications Handled the Crisis

(Originally appeared in the IABC February 2011 Newsletter written by yours truly)

On September 1, 2010, James J. Lee, a militant environmentalist who had picketed Discovery Communications headquarters in downtown Silver Spring, MD in the past, entered its lobby and took three people hostage. Lee had a bomb strapped to him and threatened to blow up the building.

Last month, Michelle Russo, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications for Discovery, shared her team’s experiences and lessons learned before an audience of more than 100 communications professionalat IABC/DC Metro's regular chapter meeting.

Russo said one of the first things she realized as the crisis unfolded, is that no amount of planning can prepare you for feeling personally threatened. Thus it is important to monitor your own reaction and that of your colleagues. Relying on a well-thought out Crisis Plan is important, but so is relying on your best professional instincts to guide your actions throughout the crisis.

Here are some of the other lessons learned from that day and its aftermath:

Prepare to Message in the Moment – Crisis communications plans are reviewed by many people who adapt messaging to what they’re comfortable with. But those carefully crafted messages – in a genuine crisis – are not always what you need. Russo realized that her team knew what to say and how to say it, so messages were developed on the spot and it worked.

Consider Not Talking to the Media Right Away - Within minutes, news of the gunman entering the building spread to local and national media. Russo and her team received calls almost immediately and reporters arrived in downtown Silver Spring. The team established their first priority was Discovery employees, not a media response. The communications team decided against talking to reporters until the situation was resolved. They relied on their track record of good relationships with the media and hoped reporters would understand later why their responsiveness was not at usual levels.

Assign a communications team bridge – Russo monitored the executive bridge, where Discovery’s global leaders were kept abreast of the situation. She suggested that it would have been helpful for the global communications team to have a bridge as well to keep information flowing to the company’s front-line communicators.

Consult Other Businesses in Your Community on Your Crisis Plan – Since the Discovery building was evacuated very quickly, many employees left house and car keys, bags and other items in their offices. Local organizations pitched in to help - from the hot dog vendor warning people not to go back into the building after lunch - to another large organization which assigned two staff people to help Discovery make sure its employees got home. Russo suggested, as a best practice, to set up a reciprocal business continuity agreement, in certain situations.

Planning a Global Celebration Helped Communications Run Smoothly - Earlier that year Discovery held a global celebration of its 25 th Anniversary which lasted a full week and required partnering and planning large scale logistics with offices around the world and helped instill a cohesive internal community that was invaluable on September 1.

Employees will want to share their experiences, give them guidance on how – Discovery’s approach to social media during the crisis was to respect its employees and the decisions they made. While they asked employees not to tweet, Facebook or communicate with press about updates during the crisis, they did not want to stop people from assuring their families and friends they were safe. When two of the three hostages decided they wanted to do media interviews employees were notified so they were not surprised when their colleagues were reliving the day via various media outlets

The Geek Whisperer Offers 7 Key Questions to Ask During Web Design

What’s a geek whisperer? Katie Hawkey, who acts as a liaison between marketers, techies and designers smoothing the path for successful web design, is called that by co-workers. Hawkey works for Astek Consulting, a web consulting firm based in Chicago, Il.

If your web site was designed more than 2-3 years ago, chances are it’s dated. And the last thing that marketers want is to look like they don’t know what they are doing. Hawkey, chief operating officer for Astek Consulting, provides a few key questions marketers can ask their web developers and designers so they don’t look like they need a copy of “Web Sites for Dummies.”

1. Can you create or use a content management system so that I can update my own web site?

Companies used to think of their web sites as online brochures, so it didn’t matter if the information was stagnant. But with social media, blogging and news feeds, you need to be able to change information on your site without going back to your developer all the time. Those small changes will add up. So make sure you get a web platform that allows you to make changes as you need too.

2. Will you be designing in html or Flash?

Even with today’s cool graphics and improving technology, Flash is still not as search engine friendly as HTML. For instance, says Hawkey, Google is unable to read the text in many Flash sites to index the content for search. So if the bulk of your site is in Flash it’s going to be tough for search engines to scan your site and find words they are trying to match to a user's search.

Also mobile phones read html and can be very unfriendly to Flash. The IPhone doesn’t read Flash at all. Better to stay with html and insert a bit of Flash to make your site more contemporary.

3. Can you design the site so we can feed our blog information directly into social media sites?

Many blogs do this because it gives the writer and his/her company complete control over all information that goes out, and updates every time a new blog post appears. But if your blog auto-feeds into your Facebook page for instance, it will start to look robotic (like the Facebook sites that look like they are participatory but won't let you comment or discuss anything), and people will stop coming back. Better to pick and choose which content is dynamic and what you want to feed out to other sites.

4. Can you deliver the designs for review in a way that we can view them in a browser?

At the beginning of the design process you will usually get a couple of comps that are options for your site's home page and/or secondary page design. A web site is a dynamic visual and you will never know what you are looking at if you get print outs of potential designs rather than seeing them in a browser. Color, images and design approach need to be reviewed in the medium in which they will be used. This will eliminate any surprise factor as you move forward with the design process.

5. What information do you recommend we put above the fold?

In a print piece, before the fold means what you see first, before you unfold the brochure or advertisement, etc. On a web site above the fold is what you see on the home page of a web site before you scroll down. You always want your most important messages above the fold, and secondary points or messages below it. You will also want to try calling up your home and subsequent pages on a Mac-based and a PC-based system as well as on mobile phones, IPads and other devices to see what it looks like live.

6. Can you help us brand our look and feel across multiple platforms?

Believe it or not, many marketers still don’t address all their forms of communications with customers and prospects when redesigning a web site. Particularly in tough economic times, a decision could be made to update a web site and leave other materials as they were before. You don’t want inconsistent visual, verbal or written messages across different communications platforms. Developing an integrated approach from the beginning will help, even if you end up phasing in the changes gradually.

7. What pixel width do you recommend for my site?

Right now Astek is recommending most clients go with a design at 975px wide. This is definitely a conversation to have at the beginning of the design process as it will have a huge impact on the layout. Google reports that 90% of Internet users will be able to see a design that is 975px wide without needing to scroll left to right. If you work in an industry where out-dated computers are the norm, you may want to consider keeping your site to 825px wide. This will accommodate about 95% of Internet users.

But there is a price to pay for the 150px difference. It translates to about two inches of additional width on most monitors, and it will have a huge impact on how much content you can get above the fold.

A final note from Katie is that you should tell designers at the outset you want 12 point type for all content - anything smaller will be too hard to read.

For more information email katie@astekweb.com.