3 Lessons From A Marketing Superstar
I was just rereading Jeffrey J. Fox’s marvelous book, How To
Become A Marketing Superstar this week, and had to start jotting
down some notes to pass along. Fox has a wonderful knack for
distilling his hard-won wisdom into two or three page chapter
nuggets that others would have to teach an entire college
semester to get across.
Here are a few of my favorites:
* NEVER USE WE. Eliminate the personal pronouns “I,”
“me,” “we,” “us,” or “our” in advertising, packaging, sales
literature or anywhere else in marketing communications. “We” is
about the marketer and its story. “We” is in the first person.
“We” is a bad proxy for your brand name or company name. Your
job is to draw the customer into the conversation by focusing on
her and her story, her concerns, her headaches, her wants. Your
job is to build brand awareness, not “we’ awareness…Never use
“we,” “us,” or “our” in the headline. The advertisement is not
about you, it is not about your success or experience or hard
work. It is about the customer and what the product will do for
her or him. To confound this sin, these same advertisers often
follow their “we” with trite clichés like, “We put customers
first,” or, “We are committed to excellence.”
* SELL CONSEQUENCES. Always communicate the consequences
to the customer of going without your product…It is always
more effective to influence the customer by showing the cost,
damage or loss they incurring right now by going without your
product. Few customers knowingly ignore consequences and then
deliberately buy an alternative product on the basis of a lower
price alone….What is it costing your prospect right now to not
be doing business with you each month? What other consequences
will occur if she delays taking action right now?
* DIFFERENCES. If you flip through any small stack of
magazines you will quickly find many examples of ads that inform
of such things as “our people make the difference,” or “little
details make all the difference,” “feel the difference,” or
even, “the right choice makes all the difference.” These are all
signs of lazy marketers who have not taken the effort to think
through what makes their product “different.” And yet it is
these differences that are your selling points and even your
competitive edges (or are they just “wishful differences” with
your competitor having the real competitive edge.) If the
marketer is too lazy to think through the differences and
articulate them, how can he expect the customer to do it for
him? If you can’t illustrate to the customer why your widget
is different and better than the Brand X widget, he will either
choose based upon price, or by what his cousin Ernie thinks he
once heard someone say about your brand).
If you haven’t read How To Become A Marketing Superstar yet, go
pick up a copy. I’d loan you mine, but I’m still rereading it.
COPYRIGHT © 2005, Charles H. Brown
