Seems we’ve been up to our eyeballs in positioning and message strategy work at Outsource Marketing lately. Of course, positioning should be the cornerstone of all your marketing communications—without meaningful differentiation, you’ve got nothin’, after all.
But your positioning has to be more than simply unique and matter to your prospects. It has to be true, too.
If you are selling “the world’s toughest phone” that’s “virtually unbreakable,” perhaps it should be.
While Sonim XP1 CEO Bob Plaschke handled this with an amazing amount of grace, the fact is it would appear to some that this is nothing more than another hollow marketing claim.
Persuasion, good.
Puffery, bad.
Not just because you might get caught. It’s because it doesn’t respect the people that ultimately pay the bills—your customers.
Is Sonim guilty of the age-old marketer’s practice of marketing puffery? Considering their “unbreakable” phone broke, does it really matter?
One of the Seven Keys to Responsible Marketing is being message responsible. That means marketers should respect all their audiences by seeking permission, telling the truth, honoring privacy and avoiding clutter.
Want to know what Responsible Marketing is about but don’t have the time to read our white paper on the topic?
Well, here’s “The 7 Keys to Responsible Marketing in 2 Minutes,” featuring the characters you’ve grown to love (or hate) in our Responsible Marketing web shorts.
Why not believe it? You just heard it from the Devil himself.
Well, because it’s all a lie.
Sex sells sex.
Sex gets attention.
And sex creates controversy.
But it seldom converts attention to action.
And most people don’t recall the brand the ad was for.
Men respond better than women to sexy ads, as expected. But in Buyology, author Martin Lindstrom shared this interesting tidbit: One study found that even for men, recall for sexually explicit ads was less than 10%, but recall was nearly twice that for the non-sexually charged ads.
Steve Hall of Adrants puts it perfectly when talking about sex in advertising call it:
. . . a lame cop-out used by marketers who lack imagination to create more compelling work that will sustain itself beyond the initial titillation.
By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the following PSA warning of the dangers of texting while driving produced by the Gwent Police Department in the UK.
The nearly unbearable gritty realism of a head-on collision features heads snapping back and forth on impact, gushing blood, a child crying for its dead parents and a dead infant has created controversy, and as expected—conversation.
The argument against: It’s simply too explicit.
The argument for: Desensitized youth will actually pay attention.
There’s merit to both points, but seeing this video made me wonder, “If this wasn’t a PSA—if this was an ad for child seats, OnStar or another product—what would the conversation look like?”
Are we more accepting of questionable content in PSA’s because it’s for the common good and not for profit?
Yesterday, I received a lumpy mailer from a company I’d never heard of. Normally I give unsolicited mail about the same amount of consideration you probably do—a few seconds.
But since it was, well, lumpy, and delivered via FedEx I opened it. Here’s what I found:
On one side, it says “Yes, these are real grasshoppers. They’ve even been approved by the FDA of Thailand.”
On the other side:
You’re a risk-taker, a dream-realizer. What’s left to do that you haven’t already done? Eat a grasshopper. They’re farm raised, covered in chocolate and rich in protein. So, not only will you be breaking boundaries, but you’ll be eating healthy, too.
I really didn’t have the time, but I couldn’t resist jumping on this to learn what it was all about. The URL takes you to a page with the following video:
As it turns out, Grasshopper offers a nicely-packaged virtual PBX service for businesses. It’s a direct competitor to Grand Central, a similar service recently purchased by Google that’s locked down while Google integrates it into their systems.
Five things I loved about this campaign
The FedEx package made it feel urgent without using deceptive “Urgent – Open Immediately” language. This is message responsible.
Lumpy mail gets opened.
This is textbook example of how to do a word of mouth campaign. Chocolate covered grasshoppers? I had to share this with colleagues and with you.
A little mystery goes a long way. There was no sales copy—just a creative idea and a URL to learn more. Irresistible.
Each tag was numbered, X of 5,000, and I understand after doing some research for this post that Grasshopper sent these packages to the people they deemed the 5,000 most influential people in America. Very flattering. But at first I thought I might need this code when I logged onto the website. Not so. This is not a limited edition keepsake, it’s a marketing piece. And by letting me know there were so many produced, it made me feel less special—at least initially.
The moving-text style video that was so fresh and interesting a year ago is beginning to get tired. I still like it, but it would seem every ‘movement’ has a video like this associated with it.
Which brings me to the whole ‘movement’ thing. I like to be inspired as much as the next entrepreneur, but I’m approaching my ‘movement’ saturation point. How many movements can one person truly join?
Still, Grasshopper has succeeded where most fail. In one fell swoop, they got my attention, held it, and they got me talking. And though I don’t need their service, If I did, I’d consider them.
So, what do you think of Grasshopper’s campaign?
Would you eat a chocolate covered grasshopper? (I won’t)
But if you’d like to try one, contact me and we’ll make it happen. I’ll post a video of you eating one here and you’ll be famous.
This is one of the classic Responsible Marketing questions we talk about here. It takes real creativity to break through, and this ad is creative. But it’s also controversial, and controversy gets people talking and drives word of mouth. I’d argue this ad is almost impossible to keep to yourself.
Burger King knew exactly what they were approving: A funny, but potentially offensive ad for parents that they’d never want their young children to see.
Mission accomplished.
I am Burger King’s target:
I have small children
Sir-Mix-A-Lot song was popular when I was in college
And I laughed out loud when Mix-A-Lot himself said “Booty is booty” at the end
But the idea of my kids seeing this ad makes me cringe. The word “butt” is off limits in my house (my kids are age six and four), and the sexual references are everywhere.
So, now do you believe you respecting all of your audiences?
This spot from Banco Provincia of Argentina was a real eye-opener for me.
Respectful ads targeted to the gay and lesbian market are rare enough. But a company—a bank, nonetheless—treating a transgendered person in such a thoughtful, dignified way? Incredible.
Check out the comments on YouTube: They’re overwhelmingly positive.
When Lissa Boles shared this with me, she asked if this was “the epitome of Responsible Marketing?”
Roughly, it’s when formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seek to create the impression of spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.*
On Friday, The Daily Background Blog revealed that a Belkin employee was doing just that: Paying 65 cents for perfect reviews on Buy.com, NewEgg.com and Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, where people can receive micropayments for small technical tasks computers can’t do.
To their credit, Belkin’s CEO responded over the weekend, stating that “Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this.” The company went on to take responsibility, asked forgiveness and claimed Belkin will remove all the false reviews and posts on Mechanical Turk.
Hats off to Belkin for the quick response—this is exactly the way this should have been handled and they’ve surely avoided even more negative word of mouth.
But I ask you, Responsible Marketer, at what point do we hold a company accountable for the actions of its representatives? Is all forgiven with Belkin? Could this have been avoided?
Seems like a great argument for social media training to me, but what do you think?
