But your positioning has to be more than simply unique and matter to your prospects. It has to be true, too.

With that in mind, watch this:

View on YouTube

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?

What do you think?

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With Hyundai’s Assurance Program, if you lose your job, you can return your car to the dealership.

Any automaker could have done this, but they haven’t—yet. And Hyundai did it first.

Not only will this drive word of mouth, it positions Hyundai as a company that cares—not just another automaker desperately trying to move metal.

What’s more, this is simply smart business:

When someone starts missing payments, what happens? Collection calls are followed by legal notices, and eventually the gets a visit from the repo man and their car gets to ride the hook. Ultimately, the customer is demoralized and the creditor loses money.

With this program the car is returned without incident, the customer retains their dignity and Hyundai is the good guy.

I think it’s brilliant.

But what do you think?

Comment below to share.

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Via Trendhunter

Whether you are red or blue, you can’t deny Barack Obama’s marketing prowess. Here are a few lessons every organization should consider when they are seeking ‘votes’ from prospects:

Develop strategies based on consumer insights. The Obama campaign clearly understood where America was hurting most, and developed strategies in response.

Build an organization that can deliver that strategy. Obama was casting responsible, fielding an impressive team from the very start.

Own a unique position. Hillary and Barack stood out in a sea of mostly white guys. While Obama was new, different and attractive as a brand, he claimed the word “change” first. It was the thing the market wanted most, and when others tried to claim “change,” they looked like copycats.

Work from a plan. The Obama campaign never veered very far off course from their original plan. They said they would compete in and win in red states—and they did just that.

Stay on message. From the primaries through the general election, Obama did a better job than his opponent at staying on message. Though distracted more than once, like clockwork, he would faithfully return to his message strategy.

Get a great name. Okay, maybe his name didn’t help him much.

Offer form and substance. While Obama’s marketing was the best presidential politics has ever seen, his opponent’s statements that he was a great orator but simply wasn’t ready to lead fell on deaf ears. His policies resonated better with voters, and his delivery, especially later in the campaign, were downright Presidential.

Stay positive. “Yes we can” trumps “No you can’t” every time.

Work from the ground up. Over 90% of the $640 million raised by Barack Obama came from individuals, and the bulk of that was contributions under $200.

Respond to the competition immediately. Smear tactics were often responded to within minutes by Obama’s staff and the candidate himself. The campaign’s Fight the Smears site helped spread the truth to supporters and the media.

Pick partners that reinforce your strengths and make up for your weaknesses. Obama chose a running mate that filled one of his greatest weaknesses by selecting Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Embrace social media. The Obama campaign did a masterful job using social networking sites, using word of mouth campaigns that often went viral.

Remember all your audiences. As a minority, Obama understood he would have some cross-cultural appeal. Still, Team Obama pursued an ambitious multicultural marketing effort. Here’s an ad that aired in Puerto Rico:

View this video on YouTube

The strategies above aren’t red or blue. They’re green—the color of money.

So did you pick up any other marketing tips during the campaign that might translate well to your organization?

Comment below to share.

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Photo: Rainer Jensen/European Pressphoto Agency, via The New York Times

Since 1997 we’ve met with a lot of startups.

Some become clients. Some don’t.

Sometimes, it’s because we aren’t the right fit for them, or vice-versa.

With startups we always want to learn if they are interested in Responsible Marketing or Drive-by Marketing as quickly as possible.

In 2005, I met with a startup that needed some help getting their company off the ground.

After a review of their situation, we proposed a responsible approach: Do a modest amount of planning to better understand where their prospects go for their information, develop positioning and deploy some simple outreach strategies in the appropriate places.

Their response?

Jump straight to “test marketing” without doing any groundwork. To them, “test marketing” meant deploying a bunch of postcards and seeing what happened.

Here’s the response I sent:

I understand. I’d love to work with you, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t voice my concern: Test marketing makes a lot of sense, but usually not before you have done the base level of planning we recommended.

Marketing (even test marketing) without a plan is like building a skyscraper without a blueprint, operating without x-rays, or going to court without deposing any witnesses. You might succeed, but it leaves way too much up to luck.

What’s more, you may blow some of your chances with some of your best prospects. Send them something that isn’t relevant enough and they may ignore you when you send them something that might have normally garnered their attention.

We’re media-neutral and discipline neutral, but we’re very biased toward strategy (it’s our #2 company value, right under “we do everything with absolute integrity.”)

I’ve attached a sneak preview of an ad that will be running in the Puget Sound Business Journal within the next few months. I’ve also attached an article I wrote for Media, Inc. that ran last month on the topic. I think you’ll see that this is something we feel very strongly about.

I can tell the train has already left the station so the one thing I will strongly recommend you consider: Don’t send to your whole list. Send a series of no less than 3 different mailers to 5-10% of your list instead. See how they respond before you talk to thousands of prospects. When you have a winner, send to the rest of the list.

That way, at least you won’t burn opportunities.

I’ll sign off here. If/when you decide it’s time to take the next step, we can do the necessary planning and can handle the entire marketing campaign for you – Advertising, DM, PR, brochures/handouts, web, whatever.

Best of luck to you.

Patrick

I never received a response, but I know this is one of the many startups that didn’t make it—their domain name is now for sale.

The causes for new business failure are many, but this is an area that a little planning would have gone a long way.

There’s a simple pattern that has become evident after meeting with so many startups that have so many dreams:

Companies that do Responsible Marketing often succeed.
Companies that don’t, seldom do.

Responsible Marketing quickly filters bad ideas from good. It leaves little up to chance, and reduces the variables that can’t be controlled.

What’s the greatest startup success story you’ve ever seen? How about the greatest failure?

Comment below to weigh in.

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Even though it just launched yesterday, by now you’ve probably heard of CUIL: the new search engine developed by former Googlers claiming it’s the largest, most-efficient search engine on the Internet.

Results are grouped by content and instead of a single link and a snippet, longer text is offered, often along with images—a nice usability plus.

Unlike Google, CUIL doesn’t gather search history so it wins in the user privacy area, too.

CUIL’s founders helped build the search infrastructure used at Google, and have received press attention and $33 million in cold, hard cash.

For these reasons, all eyes were on CUIL yesterday and many people were asking, is CUIL a Google killer?

Not so fast.

CUIL has committed a cardinal sin of marketing.

To much fanfare, they’ve launched a flawed product and droves of people are trying it but are leaving disappointed—then telling others.

How flawed? Well, it’s flawed enough to be called the worst launch ever.

Don’t get me wrong—a product doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes the Patto Approach makes sense.

Twitter is a perfect example. The microblogging still isn’t stable. Twitter users are so accustomed to outages, the Fail Whale has it’s own fan club.

The thing is, Twitter works—at least most of the time. But it’s clear when it’s not working: Your tweets don’t load, or you see the Fail Whale.

With CUIL—at least now—it’s not so clear:

The fact is, searches return old, irrelevant pages regularly. Or pages that have no traffic. Or things you’ve never heard of. All instead of what you are really looking for.

Here are the results of a quick test of Cuil conducted by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land yesterday. Let’s just say, “ouch.”

I don’t mean to bash CUIL—this is a marketing blog, after all.

But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen this much hype for a product that’s this flawed. A little more testing would have gone a long way.

The irony here is they could have positioned CUIL as a safer search because of their privacy advantage. Or as a more usable search. Even as a “search for the people” because it combines both. Users would have been more forgiving as they worked out the kinks.

Instead, all the pre-launch buzz focused on it being “better than Google” and whole host of other things.

So, what’s more important: Getting a product to market quickly, or getting it to market working well?

And do you think CUIL is the worst launch ever?

If so, why?

And if not, who?

Comment below to weigh in.

Few brands ever truly reach the Holy Grail of marketing: Positioning so universal that the brand literally owns a word or phrase in the mind of the consumer.

What pops into your mind when I say Starbucks. . . Volvo . . . Geek Squad? That word or phrase represents that brand’s positioning to the most important person in the world: You.

As marketers, we talk about re-positioning a brand as if we are the all-being, capable of shifting public opinion by changing the wording on a website, a package or in an ad. But there’s so much more to a brand than that.

If we’ve really listened, if we’ve really paid attention, we can indeed influence positioning. But positioning really happens in the mind of the customer based on all of the personal and word of mouth experiences they have had with the brand.

“Grab life by the horns” sounds like a great phrase to plant in the minds of consumers if you are Dodge, manufacturer of Ram trucks and the high-output Hemi motor. But if “big,” “cheap,” “crap,” and “redneck,” are among the first words used to describe your brand, you’ve got problems.

Sadly for Dodge, these are indeed among the largest words in the Dodge tag cloud on Brand Tags along with “ram tough,” “tough,” and “truck.”

Dodge didn’t use these words to describe their brand—the marketplace did.

The fact is, the words we choose aren’t influencing customer opinion as much as the customer’s interaction with the product, service or organization—before, during and after the sale.

What say you?

Comment below to weigh in.

Image: Dodge.com

It doesn’t matter whether you are Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian or Green Party member—this is rich.

The House Republicans have a new fall agenda and a new slogan:

The Change You Deserve

Their thinking:

This agenda is a reflection of House Republicans’ commitment to providing American families with the change they deserve: common-sense solutions to the challenges they face in their daily lives.

The immediate marketing problem is the fact that it breaks one of the cardinal sins of positioning: Two organizations can’t own the same position. Whether it’s convenient or not, the Dems own the word “change.”

To make matters worse, the slogan is owned by Wyeth—and it’s for anti-depressant drug Effexor.

And even though the slogan is already the butt of jokes on Capitol Hill and in the blogosphere, House Republicans won’t change it.

Oh, the irony.

So, in your opinion, what is the House Republicans’ greatest offense?

You can also comment below to weigh in.

Photo credit: Reid Parhamr, via Wikipedia

While most brands own a few words, in my experience, only one brand has delivered consistently: Volvo. When I say it, the words “safety” or “safe” are shouted in unison. It’s almost like a cheer sometimes—kinda creepy.

Well, now there’s a website that has taken branding free association a step further.

Brand Tags is “a collective experiment in brand perception” where you view a series of logos and type in the word or words that immediately come to mind for each.

Here’s a tag cloud for a popular American brand:

That’s just a small sampling of the cloud, but you get the point.

Can you guess who this is for? I’ll bet you can.

In case you are wondering, the two largest words in the Volvo tag cloud: “safe” and “safety.”

Comment below to share the word or phrase you would like associated with your brand.

Inspiration for this post came from my partner, Bill Boyd, ABC who discovered it on a CCM discussion list.

Ask a room full of people to shout out the single word that comes to mind when you say “Volvo,” 90% will say “safety.” Owning a meaningful word or phrase in the mind of the consumer is the holy grail of marketing, I’d say.

To own a word is expensive and time consuming, isn’t it?

Yes.

And no.

Now you can own a word in less than a minute. If you haven’t heard about The Big Word Project, you soon will.

It’s a simple idea, really. All the words in the English dictionary are being sold at $1 per letter and redefined by the buyer—kind of like naming rights for the rest of us.

The way you redefine a word is you point it to a URL.

I bought a few words:

Not bad, eh?

“Positioning” points to Outsource Marketing. The rest point to this blog.

As I write this, 3,775 word have been purchased. You might think anything worth owning would be taken, but that’s not the case.

I looked up dozens of words relative to marketing responsibility, marketing outsourcing and a number of our client’s businesses and was surprised how many common words are still available.

Of course, since I’m really a 14-year-old boy at heart, my searches devolved to turbo, stinky, boob and poop.

All but the latter are available.

Five reasons you should care:

1. This thing is picking up steam. Social media and viral marketing are driving word of mouth—it’s already been covered by a few hundred blogs, and now traditional media is beginning to jump on it.

2. The site already has a lot of quality inbound links. Since it will link back to you, it should be cheap SEO.

3. Good words (not just silly ones) are currently available but are going fast. Categorically descriptive words like insurer, accountants and medicine aren’t taken yet. If I didn’t hate cybersquatters so much, I’d gobble them all up myself.

4. For defensive purposes. Anyone can buy a word and point it anywhere. Volvo missed the boat. Tecniglas spent six bucks and now owns the word “safety.” In all fairness, even though Outsource Marketing has has a legitimate claim for the name “positioning,” since we’ve positioned hundreds of companies, products and services, Al Ries and/or Jack Trout really should own it.

5. A buck a letter is really, really cheap.

Okay, so buying a word the Big Word Project probably won’t carry quite the same weight as the Volvo brand, but hey, where else can you own a word for the price of a latte or two?

So, which words would you like to own?

Comment below to weigh in.

Inspiration from this post (and my word-buying spree) came from Maren Hogan when she purchased the word “recruit.”

An avid wine collector, Eric has watched Vaynerchuk’s video blog since its debut. Vaynerchuk’s energy, authenticity and social media savvy caught Eric’s attention, and a few others as well. Vaynerchuk is now one of the Internet and wine world’s biggest rock stars.

Why should you care? From a personal branding and marketing perspective, Vaynerchuk is doing a lot right.

Last Wednesday, I shared my thoughts regarding personal positioning, a phrase I coined in 1996 to describe the way to build the foundation for personal branding.

Here are Vaynerchuk’s thoughts on the topic:

You gotta love his quote, “You need to differentiate yourself and establish yourself. Don’t buy lists. Make lists.”

Hallelujah.