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The Last 20th Century Marketing Manifesto |
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The following fundamentals are demonstrable and provable. Yet almost all business, management, marketing, sales, advertising or public relations professionals will disdain them. They will believe that their own efforts or industry or experience or worth disprove them. They will fight with vigor, feeling their reputations or self-interests are at stake. But no matter how much they object to this behavior-centric view of their specialties, the ultimately inevitable truth is that these matters, as stated, are demonstrable and provable. Few of them have the exposure to behavioral psychology to accept and embrace these precepts - though after a period of consideration and discussion, all will eventually do so. For the moment, please understand that any expression of these "dark secrets" will make many people quite uncomfortable, and engender their opposition. These sections follow: * Ritual versus revenue Ritual versus revenue A lot of companies get stuck going through activities that they've conducted in the past simply because the company has always done so-and-so. Company activities may not change, but this marketplace certainly has. In 1999, for example, most companies still failed to realize that the entire COMDEX experience addressed less than 10% of the prospective customer base. Companies that don't regard necessary changes in marketing and distribution strategies as almost traumatic in scope will exhibit a variety of telltale symptoms. Sales will rise slowly if they rise at all. Web conversion to sale statistics will remain well below 5%. Revenues will not significantly rise as advertising and promotional expenditures increase. Competitors will gnaw at their share of market. Stock performance will be lackluster. Channel inventories will exhibit slow turns and increasing returns. Selling isn't From a behavioral perspective, there is almost no such thing as selling. No one sells anything. People buy things. The role of the seller is that of the fulfiller of the buyer's purchasing initiative. In this context, marketing is the effort to convince somebody who might some day buy something like the thing that you offer that he or she wants to buy your thing today. The best sales organizations are those that, first and foremost, remove hurdles from the path of a buyer who wishes to make a purchase now. And the very best sales people are also doing marketing. They have an almost intuitive understanding of marketing. Their counterparts in marketing seldom have any intuition at all for sales. And this combination - with the addition of egos - makes for no small amount of consternation for managers. Emotions in motion The computer industry has been a growth industry for 25 years. Its rate of growth forgave a lot of fundamental mistakes that might more significantly hurt companies in more stable traditional industries. Among those is a tendency to sell on a "feeds and speeds" product-feature basis. 130 years of behavioral research science tells us otherwise. In short, bumper-sticker concepts, it adds up to this. No one sells anything; people buy things; the most you can hope to do is to compel them to want to buy your thing today. And nobody buys anything because of what it does, but because of what it does for him or her. For example, while it's easy to think that people buy light bulbs because they produce light, it's more useful to consider that they really buy light bulbs as a preferred cure for darkness. Every purchase decision is emotional; logic only enters at the rationalization phase, where the buyer is granting himself or herself permission to make the purchase. (That churning sound you hear is ten thousand behaviorists turning over in their graves as I reduced their combined lives' works to a paragraph). The point here is that your own sales require emotional, even visceral appeals to your prospective customers. And it's all part of the fabric of day-to-day operations. Purchasing as behavior. Little has been as thoroughly researched as the ways in which people respond to advertising, and especially so when those responses are expressed in actual purchasing. Nor has any so populous a field of research been so universally ignored by sales, marketing and management professionals. The conclusions are obvious, and are easy to concisely capsulize. All buying decisions are emotionally based, regardless of the product or category of product or purchaser. The entrance of logic occurs during a rationalization phase. Rationalization follows the emotional commitment to purchase, and normally is an episode of giving oneself permission to make the purchase to which the emotions have already committed. While it's true that some buyers can be lost during the rationalization phase, no buyer is ever gained in this phase. This is why analytical, comparative or features-based marketing does (and always necessarily must) not accomplish strong results. Advertising and marketing people like to speak in terms of features and benefits. Many of them misunderstand these terms, and they are even less effective communicators in trying to explain their strategies and tactics to those outside their specialties. This short definition should help: features are those things (attributes) a product owns, while benefits are those things or attributes that a user of the product owns. The more emotionally charged these attributes are perceived to be, the more urgent the buyer's need to purchase becomes. For example, why do people buy light bulbs? To provide light? Not necessarily, since there are other convenient ways to get light, like the window and the sun, or a candle. From a more behavioral perspective, people buy light bulbs as their preferred cure for darkness. This isn't "solution selling". That approach would have us package up light bulbs, fixtures, wiring and the services of an electrician, plus a service agreement with a utility to provide power. Note how at this moment, you are yourself uncomfortable with that premise? That's an emotional response, and one which will prevent you from wanting our postulated package purchase, at least for the moment. So, if all commerce is based on purchasing and all purchasing is emotionally driven, the job of marketing becomes one of identifying the product's emotional appeal, and of communicating that to any and all people who might reasonably respond by purchasing the product. What the computer industry doesn't know One way to define an industry is by looking at the audience of the publications that serve that industry. So if we take the universe of people who see computer publications or broadcasts, we're dealing with a computer industry boasting a population of under 30 million people. What's wrong with that picture? There are almost 350 million people with computers on their desks. We're smack onto one of those ritual-versus-revenue issues. What the computer industry doesn't know is that it isn't a niche industry any longer. It is, today, a home and business consumer marketplace - and has been since early 1997. But few of the companies doing business in this industry are changing their approach to sales or marketing to keep up with where the buyers are. For example, something like 8 million people buy their first computer system from Wal-Mart every month. As a result of that (and other big retailers), very literally hundreds of millions of $8 to $15 bargain bin software packages go out those doors every year. Know of many software companies tapping into that? And this kind of impact ripples throughout the industry, with an eventual impact on every product in every category. Which also means that for those who recognize and capitalize on the new opportunities this presents, growth can come easily. But it may not come at all without change, and some may not survive at all if they're late to recognize what's happening. Are your competitors smarter or luckier than you are? If so, and they figure this out and establish their initiatives before you do, how much damage can they do? We strongly recommend consumer-level initiatives now. (And it ain't Chicken Little if the sky really is falling). And if your customer base is still demonstrably the farthest imaginable from any definition of a consumer marketplace, today's populations nonetheless make the techniques of consumer marketing almost always a more revenue-productive approach than the narrow focus and long lead times of over-defined target marketing. The argument against targeting. Tight targeting can be a good and necessary approach in marketing and sales, but is much more likely to be a wrong approach; unfortunately, it is often brought into play by default, without considering that it might work to the detriment of a current agenda or initiative. Neither extreme in targeting tightness is tenable. Totally untargeted efforts totally randomize opportunities for revenue - you never know if the people you're reaching will ever have any interest. Totally targeted efforts totally eliminate most new opportunities for revenue by only identifying known buyers, who ironically can only reach that status by already having fulfilled their need with an earlier purchase and are therefore not currently prospective buyers. The ubiquitous defense for tight targeting is a husbanding of limited resources. It's a rather pat argument but does not survive close examination. Even if an organization is impossibly starved for resources, the argument for tight targeting based on conservation and effective usage of those resources is still invalid. Here's why. If you target too much, you can only compete as a replacement for existing goods, which adds the burden of compelling the customer to both an emotional divorce from a preferred product and facing the unwelcome product of incompatibility issues in the changeover. That tends to produce long sales cycles and low revenue yields for overly focussed targeting; there is also an empirically demonstrable low yield in purchaser conversion. So tight targeting comes at the expense of low ROI, in part also due to a higher cost per sale as a quid pro quo of the contained promotional and marketing costs. Tight targeting also prevents new classes of purchasers from buying from you, simply because you will have chosen not to let them know what you offer. The argument for looser targeting - not random, just looser - is that modestly higher marketing costs are quickly balanced by a lower cost per sale, higher volumes and much faster sales cycles. There can be dramatically more revenues returned. Here's why. Markets change. The customers you (or your competitors) had 2-3 years ago are either still happy with what they got then, or have added to it, or have replaced it. There is a small chance you can sell to them now, but it requires that either their needs have grown or that their needs have shifted in your direction. These are the people you can reach with tight targeting. Now consider that if those established customers have growing needs, so will those who were, in that same time frame, not yet within your sphere. Growth in customer requirements in speed and capacity is (and always has been) universal. If you define your customer in terms of the need for speed and capacity (instead of by occupation or profile), the targeting iris opens much, much wider. There is still targeting, but on a different and much broader scale. Fortunately, the delivery mechanisms to target more broadly come at only a modest increase in cost and perhaps no increase at all. Why? Because looser targeting does not have to come at the expense of higher sales or support costs. Because once you get the messages about what you offer out more broadly, your first and fastest and most likely sales prospects will come and volunteer themselves to you. Rather than you choosing to whom you wish to try to sell, the marketplace will show you who is ready and willing and eager to buy. Tricks for speeding and increasing revenue production. The infamous "nobody ever got fired for buying [brand]" rationale is only slightly off the mark in dealing with behavioral mechanisms for revenue improvements in sales and marketing operations. The leading attribute associated with customer purchase decisions today is safety - not product safety, but the belief that a product selection is a safe choice for the purchaser, one that won't put negative emotional elements into play. He or she won't be sorry, won't be ridiculed by management, won't be fired - and will be recognized as smart, clever, etc. Assuming your marketing and sales resources are capable of coming up with the right messages that can successfully communicate the emotional appeal of your products to prospective customers, there are several ways to turn interest into income more quickly. One is to reach the boss at the same time you reach your prospect. (American Express is very good at this. So is Intel). One is to use higher profile tactics in getting your messages out. Be more visible. Risk being more outrageous. Be identifiably singular in the context of what your competitors are doing. Burger King uses rock music to bring old customers back to give the same terrible food a second chance. Swanson puts the imprint of a TV dinner pan into the sidewalk outside Mann's Chinese Theater. Apple throws hammers through screens on TV. Recognize the customer's need to grant self-permission for the purchase and support it eight ways from Sunday on the Web site (where it's much less expensive than through traditional media). Then let them call, write or e-mail right now for a sales contact - you, a distributor, a dealer, whatever works for the channel structure you have in place. The whole trick comes down to getting more potential customers interested in buying now, and reversing the field so that they come to you to do it. For emotional reasons, not feeds and speeds or features or price. Iomega is a great model for making this approach work. Properly framed, every marketing, advertising, sales, PR or promotion activity should be able to demonstrate that it produces revenue. But recognize that there are damned few professionals in any of these areas today who know how to frame their activities in this context. Misuse of meetings as anathema to management. You hire good people because of what you perceive them to know about the duties you proscribe for the positions into which they're hired. I'll bet not one job posting carries the requirement for "Renaissance Man" or universal sage. So consider the collection of specialists you find seated around the table at any given meeting. When you plan a major launch, you'll have product managers, marketing people, sales people, PR people, ad people, ad agency people, PR people, PR agency people, manufacturing people, engineering design people, packaging people, support people and so on. Consider that you might have 40 people around the table. On any given issue, at least 39 of them are likely to be amateur or incompetent. (Not that you would ever see that limitation causing them to participate less, voice fewer opinions or abstain from influencing others). Which means that you are supporting a system in which most decisions are made, guided or influenced by amateurs. At Microsoft, the typical team size on any given project is reportedly 6 people. On purpose. It's deliberately small specifically to avoid this kind of time, morale and resource drain. They don't work like that at the Pentagon, either (the resource most often cited as precedent for management by meeting). They have meetings only to share information (mostly status reports and forecasts) and to dispatch new agendas. There's nothing democratic about it. You will find it difficult to cite any counterexamples to the statement that in the absence of a Pentagon-like hierarchical control, no large meeting is ever truly productive. They are however circular, providing endless additional agenda items for future meetings. Nor do redundant staffers staff these large meetings. The erosion to human resources represented by such meetings (consider that any one 4-hour meeting can eat approximately $4,000 in salary costs) echoes into lost productivity for these managers and (absent their supervision) those on their staffs. But all of that pales behind the revenues lost to the results of all these meetings. Meetings are, empirically, the single largest factor in delayed market entry for most commercial products today. Meetings produce "safe" approaches to problems, determined more from sensitivity to company politics than from any real likelihood of yield. We dare you to cite a single example of a meeting from which the consensus favored any kind or risk. You already have negative feelings about products that are "designed by committee". Now extend those beliefs to programs designed by consensus. Soon, you'll find yourself wanting to redesign the entire corporate policy as to meetings. It was this kind of change at IBM that triggered their interest in acquiring Lotus (though admittedly, other factors came into play in cementing that decision). Please don't have a meeting about this. Rethinking ad programs A reliable source recently told us that a one-time, full-page four-color ad in PC Magazine - on the rate card at something like $60,000 - can be yours or anybody's for $15,000. There has been that much erosion in the demand for ad pages. Some of that comes from increasingly sophisticated advertising results monitoring, which shows decreasing return on investment for virtually any advertising in computer media. Certainly, companies like Gateway 2000, Dell, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft are doing more of their advertising in more general media. Why? One reason is that the segment of general media audiences that is likely to buy a computer product is now much larger than ever before, making for a very respectable conversion to purchase. One reason is that product ads in these media also helps increase the company's exposure and viability to investment markets. We won't get into all of the detail on smarter ways to spend ad dollars, except to say that for many companies, a redeployment of existing budgets can significantly improve the sales that result. There are, for example, direct marketing techniques that (thanks to the fulfillment mechanisms of the Web) can make some small space placements very productive. (In this context, we note that the one-time rate for a two-column wide by three-inch tall ad in the national edition of the Wall Street Journal costs only $6,500). Few computer companies have learned the clever ways to buy broadcast media. CBS Radio News at drive time on Thursday mornings is the single most productive broadcast purchase for selling business computer products from the shelves of computer superstores on Saturdays, when most such purchases occur. (That's a strange combination of "trivia" points that can make a big difference, but to which few people pay attention). Short-flight TV buys on A&E, TLC, Discovery, USA, TNT, Sci-Fi and Cartoon Network can produce more desktop computer aftermarket sales than any combination of print at several times the budget, but this is unfamiliar ground for most computer companies. (There are also huge bargains in the two weeks before Christmas, which can be very sales-productive for companies who are already well represented on retailer shelves). Of course, placement is only half the battle. The commercials themselves have to be brilliant. And while some have been OK, and some cute, and a few even memorable, there aren't many companies doing yeoman work as a result of well-conceived TV spots. And there could be. One more comment before we leave this subject - and one that ties back to creating an emotional and visceral appeal. Computer advertising is 50 years behind the curve using the power of recognizable celebrities to add personality to products. Imagine the sinister Q of Star Trek, John de Lancie, talking about what mischief can happen without a product's protection. Or the charmingly stupid Brak of Cartoon Planet, Andy Merrill, talking about a product so easy it makes him look smart. Or the bike-riding cops of CHiPs, Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada, talking about the speed & authority that comes from the chips at the heart of the hardware. It all starts with what it is you have to sell, but from there, a sense of how to negotiate with Hollywood and tie it into sales-productive spots is all it takes. (All it takes, yes, but apparently still a hard combination to find - or trust - among the people and thinking that goes into computer advertising). An individual's image associated with the product in many venues - ads, point of purchase, collateral materials, personal appearances - over a span of time, continually and repeatedly - creates a brand recognition and credibility faster and at lesser cost than almost any other activity. What makes PR weak? All advertising costs money. That's obvious. Here's something less obvious: All PR costs money, including good PR, bad PR and no PR. And one more, even less obvious: PR can and should be sales-productive. The biggest problem with PR is the people doing it, the things companies have them do, and the resources they have to work with. (We're going to spend a little more time on this topic than the others, because it's the place where you can accomplish the most good for the least money). Most computer PR operations spend 90% of their energy chasing computer publications, which (as we showed above) reach less than 10% of the computer purchasing populace. They place a lot of emphasis on the so-called advice-giver/influencer role, which, alas, is in today's marketplace a myth kept alive by the sales and survival efforts of computer publications. These PR operations worry about things like product roundups (comparative reviews), on the theory that they lead to competitive purchasing decisions. In truth (as we said), all such decisions being emotional, these only have a role in the rationalization phase of purchasing; buyers look for good numbers to make them feel good about the decision they have emotionally already made. They want to handhold product reviewers throughout the review process. It's expensive, unnecessary, and in any meaningful program, meaningless. They use press releases to announce awards from magazines, seldom stopping to think that no publication ever publicizes a competitor's awards. And if there's an agency, there's a profit motivation. There are many ways to produce better PR results for less money than a press tour, but none that makes an agency more money, so there's a huge emphasis on media tours. They're even something of a feel-good con game, since client front-line involvement feels like a productive activity, and egos are soothed and inflated in the process. Overwhelmingly, the elements of most of today's PR programs are much more ritual-based than revenue-motivated. Look at the ways PR operations keep score: numbers of stories, column inches, badge imprints. Just because there's something you can count and measure doesn't mean that measuring or counting it tells you anything. In fact, we invite you to define a PR measure other than increased revenue that we can't immediately tell you how to cheat. There is no real strategic or tactical planning to today's PR programs, and there is every reason to doubt that the people doing the programs have the necessary grounding to do such planning in any reasonable way. Yes, there is some blame to be placed on management and ritual. PR operations are departmental, low-priority staffs within most companies. If there's more than one layer between PR and the CEO, that's a yellow flag. The chances are also good that the people running PR aren't quite executive suite caliber - and maybe that's because you don't recruit your top PR people with executive suite compensation packages. What we want to identify here is a weakness for which companies must compensate. We can describe activities and initiatives to pursue in order to capitalize on short-term opportunities to improve your revenues, but you have to be able to address them with the right kind of horsepower in order to pull them off. At most companies, the current team is not likely to be fully capable of some of the sales-productive PR activities we will recommend. But at many, they can learn. Unitary marketing and sales-productive PR There's been a lot of talk about integrated marketing. Let's ignore it. Rather, let's think of unifying the several initiatives that have to happen in PR, advertising, sales, sales promotion, investor relations and everywhere else to make a marketing initiative produce as much revenue as possible with the least angst possible. At first glance, you may not seem to have an organization that can handle that. We think you do, because we think you've been looking in the wrong places. Imagine, for a moment, that the leadership for this effort is from the CEO's office - not necessarily the CEO personally, but somebody specially detailed to pull it all together. The operational departments report in and are coordinated by the top. It's the opposite of flattening the corporate structure. That's a great concept for selling books, but not for dealing with multiple decisions that require authoritative (executive) decisions. It cuts down on time lost to meetings, and cuts the size of the meetings that still happen. Hey, it's worked for armies for centuries, so it should work in the battle for bucks. It's also a great way to stop territorial posturing, or objections based on a less than top office perspective. Now, let's think about the elements of your plan. And let's have each operating group (department) explain how their activities are going to contribute to enhancing revenues. The other departments will be able to respond readily enough, but PR (again) will require a shift in mindset. The logic is simple enough. Sales-Productive PR requires that PR activities all have some reasonable expectation of producing sales. That means an emphasis on communicating information about products and marketing activities, and specifically kinds of information that will ultimately compel people (including intermediates, like resellers) to buy. It means giving a higher priority to activities that can be more compelling to more people sooner. So the PR operation begins focussing on opening bandwidth for messages, and on working with the other units to make sure the messages support their programs. It may also mean using different tools, or using existing tools differently. It probably doesn't mean disrupting any existing activities or agency relationships, though it may call for redeploying those resources. And it will almost certainly call for bringing some additional services into the mix, at least temporarily. One worth mentioning is a relatively recent technique in sending news over Business Wire (which outscores PR Newswire in some significant ways) called the "wire blitz". It involves orchestrating a nose-to-toes cluster of releases to have bigger-than-life impact in & beyond the press. And press reception venues are so fundamentally important that we will cover them as their own topic in just a second. First, though, we're inserting some important documents that help explain some of these PR activities. PRE-TRADE SHOW PR MESSAGE STRATEGY Whether or not you exhibit at trade shows, they are significant both to the marketplace and to the press, and therefore must be an integral element of your message planning. If you are exhibiting, you undoubtedly have one or more feature products or announcements. In the best of all possible worlds, these are new products, scheduled to ship the day the show begins; in a less optimum world, they are nonetheless what the attendees will all encounter, regardless of how much sooner or later than show time they debut. Old-school thinking suggests not disclosing anything about a new product until the day of a trade show, and holding a press conference there to announce it. More modern thinking uses a critical-path approach to create attendee curiosity just before the show, making the new product itself a draw to the exhibit. Alas, empirical observations show that most trade weeklies' issues of the week before a show are not read until their recipients return from the show. This suggests treating the issue of the previous week as the last opportunity to influence attendees. Fold in another time-proven factor: in all of marketing communications, response levels begin to optimize with the third exposure. But wait a second - what about those old school guys who want to meet the press at a trade show? Is that such a bad idea? Not at all! But a press conference venue is still ill advised. Broadly sampling trade shows with hundreds to thousands of press attending, by far most of the exhibitor press conferences drew fewer than 10 reporters, and many drew none. Companies that sponsor their own media events at trade shows can take advantage of the large numbers of journalists in attendance. This geographic "coincidence" provides an opportunity for personal exposure to key products and people for less than the cost of a media tour, usually with more journalists than a media tour can reach. There are also some shared venue press receptions that allow some small amount of display space - generally about the size of a restaurant table - for fees that tend to be around $5,000. On even smaller budgets, many companies simply adopt the practice of offering small souvenirs or mementos to editors who come to the booth to look up a PR person or key executive, whether by appointment or by whimsy. But what if you aren't exhibiting? If your competitors are, it's an important time not to cede the spotlight to them. Use the same window to tout your newest and best goodies. Also, just because you're not exhibiting at a trade show doesn't mean you can't run a trade-show special promotion. Receptions to build perceptions Receptions are a great idea, but most people are terrible at producing them. What makes them a great idea is that you control the four walls. You can fill them with people from the press, from the investment community, and with channel and OEM VIPs. What's even better is that each of those groups is more impressed with you because the other groups are also present. You can fill them with products and demos. In the most productive venues, you also fill them with all kinds of plays against a product-centric theme, from demos to visual puns in the food being served, from the invitation theme to the costumes the greeters and serves wear to the souvenir parting gifts. Microsoft spent well over half a million dollars on its "Road To 98" reception, using a Route 66 theme. But just a couple years earlier, Quarterdeck spent less than a tenth of that to introduce its first Internet products with an "I-Way 66" reception - many of the elements were identical, and Quarterdeck even had a personal appearance by Martin Milner. What's more significant is that Quarterdeck, believe it or not, got more press for its products and a bigger boost in its share price than Microsoft. A reception is not a single event but its own cluster of activities, including a surprising amount of telling people ahead of time exactly what they're coming to see. A CyberMedia reception event to introduce its Oil Change product produced two-inch thick folders of press clippings each month for the three and a half months between the date of the reception and the actual shipment of the product. That press coverage also helped create enough channel demand to make it a top ten product in its category the day it shipped. One mistake that most companies make with these reception venues - one that neither Quarterdeck nor CyberMedia made with these two examples - is to attempt to imprison its quests with a formal venue. The most productive receptions have no microphones (except for the band), no slide projectors and no speeches. That brings the advantage of multiplexing, since every company executive there can simultaneously be having one-on-one or one-on-few conversations with significant guests - and others can be viewing demos at multiple demo stations. The more "face time" a company gets, the better these receptions tend to produce. On scanty budgets, some trade shows offer opportunities for meeting the press (but not the other communities) in shared venues, where lots of journalists graze on lots of food while lots of companies hope for a little of their attention en route. At COMDEX, Pat Meier's Luncheon at Piero's is four days of feedings, right across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center, and exhibitors get a restaurant booth for their demos. Silicon Northwest and Showstoppers are evening receptions - with mountains of salmon for the first, of shrimp for the second - where exhibitors get a four-foot table space. We recommend a lot more than you might anticipate. In the fall, for example, we recommend three stand-alone receptions (especially where financial markets are a concern). One should be in your HQ city in September (or early October). One should be at the 21 Club in New York in October. And one should be at COMDEX. You should also participate in all three of the shared reception venues. Here's why. The home town reception will not get a lot of direct results, but will get some, and will give you a chance to wring out the kinks in your "production". Its real purpose is to increase hometown awareness of your company and products and activities for a few weeks later, when your more productive venues occur. We know that key journalists and analysts check back with HQ-city contacts or colleagues to check a company out, so the hometown venue stacks the deck with recent, exciting, personable memories of you. The 21 Club reception will reach a lot more of the significant New York players than the Las Vegas venues, and create opportunities for major league pre-show coverage, helping boost the results of your other sales and marketing efforts. It will also prove a significant revenue generator itself, both through the coverage you will generate there and through the inevitable interest your selected VIP guests will have in making sure the deals you're discussing - and maybe more - close quickly. The Las Vegas venues are all about Q1 and Q2 revenues, and escalating the momentum that your other activities will already be building. The shared venues are inexpensive insurance, to help make sure that competition for scheduled events doesn't keep you from seeing as many of the press as possible. There are hundreds of bottom-feeders at COMDEX receptions, and right next to them are some surprisingly high tier prestige power press people. How about an afternoon with Sharon Stone? If you could walk across the street and spend 20 minutes chatting with Sharon Stone, would you go? How about Pierce Brosnan? Meg Ryan? Bruce Willis? Mark McGwyer? Cher? OK, maybe not specifically them, short of an unadvisable $10 million endorsement budget. But the right celebrity (as we discussed) can do a lot for your sales, in a lot of places. Personal appearances at reception events help boost attendance. The right characteristics associated with the celebrity, tied into the right messages, and your ads become more effective - in part because people get their point more readily. Point-of-purchase displays are a good way to harvest the interest you create elsewhere. You don't have to use a celebrity, and in the computer industry, most attempts at using them have been terribly ill conceived, mismanaged, less-than-successful efforts. We're mentioning it again here because it's a power-play element - yes, even and especially within our context of boosting revenues - and needed one more touch before we wrap up. |