Category Archives: Marketing

Co-Create Unique Customer Experiences

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Apple created the iPod but we decide on our playlists. MySpace and Facebook aren’t really products or services but platforms for individuals to express themselves and communicate with others of their choosing. YouTube is created by you for you.

The underlying theme is that value is based on the unique, personalized experience of individual consumers. C.K. Prahalad, described by Business Week as probably the most influential thinker on business strategy today, calls it “co-creation” in his latest book The New Age of Innovation.

Prahalad writes that successful companies no longer invent new products on their own. They create them along with their customers to produce a unique experience for each individual.

Don’t confuse this with the old ‘mass customization’ model that focused on a company offering customers choices on a wide range of product or service attributes. With mass customization, the company still decided which choices to offer and how to deliver them. With “co-creation,” the choices are infinite and the individual, not the company, decides what is created and purchased.

Look at some of the most admired and successful market innovators today and their co-created offerings: Apple, Google, Starbucks, the iPhone, Gmail, The Starbucks Experience. Each focuses on the unique customer experience through co-created products and services.

What does this mean for the average company or business?

Listening to the customer, a tactic often neglected by generations of businesses, is even more vital to success and is no longer enough. Companies need to ask customers what they think and actually listen to the response. The next step is to let customers drive product and service offerings, co-create their own unique experiences.

Unfortunately, most companies are set up in the opposite manner, built around producing products and services to achieve economies of scale; reactive rather than interactive; emphasizing structure over flexibility.

The focus needs to change and fast.

You can start by asking your customers or prospects what they want. Listen, be flexible and respond by co-creating unique experiences with them and for them.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Everybody Loves Quacking

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

When Daniel P. Amos became CEO of American Family Life Assurance Company in 1990, he closed or sold underperforming operations and focused on the company’s two biggest markets, the United States and Japan, and used the $8 million savings to launch an ad campaign.

At the time, name recognition of the company was only 2%. Ten years later, it was still under 10%. Amos realized he had to do something big. His company was unable to stand out from the crowd of competitors with names that began with “American,” so Amos decided to use the acronym AFLAC and hired The Kaplan Thaler Group to make over the company’s image.

Kaplan created and tested two commercials: One featuring Ray Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond, a top rated sitcom at the time, scored an 18.18% of the people polled recalled the company’s name after watching it. Since the industry average was a 12 score, Amos had a safe option in the Romano commercial.

The second concept consisted of a duck quacking the company’s name. Amos tried explaining the commercial to colleagues, friends, and family. No one got it. But, the commercial scored an eye opening 27 when tested. Amos took a chance on the duck ad and decided to run it for two weeks to see what would happen.

The Aflac Duck ad debuted on New Year’s Day, 2000 and boy did it work. In the first year, sales were up 29% and doubled in three years. Name recognition hit an astounding 67%!

Since you might be thinking – I don’t have millions to spend on creative concepts, expensive advertising and research, – here are some things to remember from the Aflac success story:

 

  • Focus on Key Target Markets with the greatest potential
  • Simplify Your Message – the Aflac acronym vs. American Family Life Assurance Company
  • Make it Memorable: Gilbert Gottfried quacking “Aflac” sounds about right.
  • Touch Emotions: People buy Aflac Duck merchandise!
  • Commit to the Big Idea: Amos sold the concept internally, dedicated the necessary dollars, tracked results and only wears duck ties with his suits!

And remember that although Everybody Loves Raymond, the quacking duck made the difference.

 

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

What’s Your Favorite Color (and Collar)?

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

Ah, the good old days when things were simple. Blue collar workers were manual laborers who wore blue shirts to mask some of the dirt from a day’s work. Bosses wore white collar shirts because they didn’t need to worry about the dirty work and enjoyed the pristine look.

Nowadays, we hear terms like green collar for workers in the environmental sector that focus on green development and gold collar to describe jobs that require skilled labor, not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Examples include graphic designers, computer engineers, architectural drafters, researchers, engineers and top level customer service representatives.

Gold Collar workers are creative problem solvers that perform non repetitive and complex work. They use their minds and their hands equally to create products, services, and ideas. They don’t just have knowledge. They use it.

These skills and traits make Gold Collar workers valuable to employers and those in the education industry. Career and technical schools, at the secondary and post secondary levels, covet and recruit potential Gold Collar workers. Universities also see them as a valuable commodity.

How should we communicate with and market to Gold Collar workers?

 Career, Vocational and Technical schools must simultaneously convey two major messages to potential students and their parents:

  •  Gold Collar positions feature highly skilled, intelligent workers who creatively solve problems while working a career, not a job. You can land a Gold Collar position without spending four or five years working towards a degree at an expensive university.
  • Forget the tired, old, misperception of career and vocational schools. In today’s world, students are intelligent, talented and creative. Parents and students need to understand that career and technical schools provide valuable education and real life training for fulfilling and lucrative Gold Collar careers.

Conveying these messages clearly and repetitively through direct marketing, traditional and new media campaigns and public relations is a necessity for career and vocational/technical schools at the secondary and post-secondary levels.

It’s not an easy task and requires creative and systematic marketing plans, the kind that talented Gold Collar employees might develop and implement.

Employers, schools and universities need to reach and influence Gold Collar employees who are vital to our economy. The message should be clear: Gold Collar careers provide those employees with creative, challenging work and a lot of Green, as in money.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

6 Steps to Reach the Right Person with the Right Message at the Right Time

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

Back in the day, mass marketing and advertising focused on Reach and Frequency. Reach being the total number of different people exposed to a message at least once and frequency meaning the number of times the target market sees or hears an ad.

Advertisers worried about the cost to reach a thousand members of the coveted Adult 25-54 market. Huge budgets were necessary to buy TV, radio and newspaper advertising.

Those were the days…if you were selling ads. But advertisers with small and medium sized budgets were playing an expensive game of darts, hoping to hit the target.

With the communication opportunities available today, companies can focus on segmented target audiences that have the specific wants, needs and characteristics of their ideal customers, right?

Not exactly.

True market segmentation is unfortunately not the norm. Companies do not drill down into their target markets enough and rarely define their ideal customer in detail. Instead of connecting with true prospects, organizations continue to throw darts and hope to reach more customers via broad online and offline advertising.

Shift the focus from Reach and Frequency to Connections and Relationships. This is not to say Relationship Building is a new thing. The opposite is true. Relationships have been key to business deals for centuries. What has changed is segmentation and a one-to-one focus are more possible than ever.

Here are five steps to help you reach the right person with the right message at the right time:

  • Define your ideal customer and how they would use your product or service. What are their pain points? What solutions are they looking for? The more specifics, the better.
  • Use this Ideal Customer Profile to create segmented target markets that you can drill down or “slice and dice” into distinct yet manageable groups.
  • Analyze those target markets to gain an understanding of their wants, needs and tastes, all of which change over time. Tweak your product or service based on what you learn.
  • Make connections and communicate with current and potential customers when, where and how they want to. Use a mix of social media, direct marketing and traditional media.
  • Build long term, meaningful relationships via ongoing marketing touches based on their wants and needs. Give without always expecting to get.
  • As technology continually improves, the way we do business changes. Yet the basic premise remains the same. Find out what the customer wants and give it to them when and where they want it at a price they’re willing to pay.

But now, instead of broadcasting your message to the masses and hoping it makes the desired impact, you can focus on making connections and building relationships with ideal customers.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Don’t Forget The Basic Eight

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

“I know (Client or Prospect name). I’m ready.”
“I’ll just wing it.”
“I got this.”

Marketing and sales people rationalize the absence of Pre Call Prep with these and other spoken and unspoken beliefs.

When, how and why do we need to do Pre Call Prep?

You need to do Pre Call Prep before every marketing activity.

If you pick up the phone to call a client, you should’ve done some Pre Call Prep.

If you are dropping something off on a service call, you should’ve done some Pre Call Prep.

If you are heading into an internal meeting with peers and others in the organization, you should’ve done some Pre Call Prep.

Unfortunately, real Pre Call Prep is rarely done at all, let alone done well. Yet an investment of only 5 to 15 minutes dramatically improves the outcome of a meeting, telephone call or presentation.

Take the time to do the obvious–The Basic Eight–and make it part of your selling process:

  1. Review the prospect’s website. See if there’s any new company news. Check out the featured item on the Home Page. Scan the About Us section.
  2. Google both the client and your contact.
  3. Spend a few minutes on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media to move beyond the person behind the desk. Learn how they see themselves and what’s important to them.
  4. Talk to fellow employees and people in your network to see what they have heard or know about both the client and your contact.
  5. Review your notes from past marketing calls or meetings. The recap jogs your memory about important personal and business details.
  6. Map out your top call objectives. Be specific and realistic.
  7. Jot down fact and emotion based questions to ask. Think about how you’ll respond to verbal and non verbal cues with specific questions.
  8. Brainstorm about potential stalls or objections you might hear and how to respond to each. Role-play with someone you trust enough to tell you how you are really doing.

I know you got this-but invest a few minutes on Pre Call Prep anyway. Your post call smile (and sales numbers) will be bigger because of it.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Messages Made to Stick

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

Halloween traditions changed in the 1960’s and ’70′s when rumors circulated about strangers putting razor blades in apples and candy. Halloween events were held at schools and parents warned children not to eat snacks that weren’t pre-packaged.

In 1985, researchers studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958 and found no instances where strangers caused children harm by tampering with their candy.

How did the candy tampering story spread across the country despite a lack of evidence? Why was it remembered and believed by millions? The story had what Chip and Dan Heath call stickiness. In their book Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors detail the formula for sticky messages:

S implicity—Strip an idea to its core
U nexpectedness—Capture people’s attention
C oncreteness—Explain ideas in human terms
C redibility—Make ideas believable
E motions—Get people to feel something
S tories—People remember and act on stories
S ix Principles of Stickiness

The principles make sense and we have all probably heard similar suggestions before. Yet most of our messages aren’t remembered and communication problems impact organizations, teams and families on a regular basis.

Why? It could be because we rarely apply the Six Principles of Stickiness.

Here’s a real life example:

“We are a multinational corporation engaged in socially responsible operations, worldwide. We’re dedicated to providing products and services of such quality that our customers receive superior value while employees and business partners share in our success and our stockholders receive a sustained superior return on their investment.”

Simple? Unexpected? Concrete? No, No, No. Does it stir emotions? Tell a story? What’s the product? Why should we care?

How about this one:

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
– Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

The message captures your attention in human terms. The statistic is memorable and the story resonates. You feel something. The message is SUCCESSfully sticky.

But you don’t have to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company to reach and influence your target audiences. Apply the six principles and you, too, can make your messages stick.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Cloud Music Changes How We Buy and Listen

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

As a kid, I remember listening to 8-tracks move from one track to the next by fading a song in and out. While working as a DJ in my teens, I found 45’s easy to use while cassettes were a bit more difficult to cue up when working a dance or dimly lit bar.  Suffice it to say, I was happy to see the compact disc arrive and now think it would be much easier to play a wedding or dance using digital music.

It’s easy to see how we consume music changes over time.

Today, Cloud Music services provide a completely new way to look at (or should I say listen to) music. No more time spent making sure your music is available in your car, at the office or throughout your home. No more synching multiple devices.

You can choose to have an online “digital locker’ with Amazon Cloud, Google Music or iTunes Match, which lets you store your music online and play it back on any computer or device.

Or you can go with a subscription service like Spotify, Rhapsody or MOG and have unlimited streaming of just about any song ever made for a monthly or annual fee.

Record companies see the combination of digital locker and streaming services (which pay a royalty per listen) as a potentially lucrative and maybe even industry saving revenue stream.

Amazon and Apple are battling for future download sales. Once a customer chooses their digital locker, the odds are they’ll stay and buy their music from that company.

Google’s free cloud storage might be appealing to Android users who want their music everywhere.

Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and others are betting that the trend of buying subscription services in other industries will expand to music.

The broad target audience can be defined as “just about everybody” because so many people enjoy music. It will be interesting to see how each company segments or drills down into the market and tailors its message to reach and influence prospective customers.

It doesn’t necessarily mean music ownership is dead. But Cloud Music services clearly will grow and change how we listen and buy music.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Marketing Lessons from the Campaign Trail

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Political campaigns share a lot of the characteristics of marketing and selling programs:

  • The winners drill down into segmented target audiences and find out what they want or what resonates with the target group.
  • Creative messages are developed and tweaked to reach and influence those target audiences.
  • A strategic plan is crafted to “get the word out.”
  • Reach and frequency of message is achieved through various communication mediums.
  • Competitive analysis and positioning against the competition is part of the plan.
  • Direct selling or “making the ask” is done again and again.

This year’s Presidential Primary Campaign is a good example. Last night’s Iowa caucus showed how important market segmentation and creative messaging is. The negative ads hurt Newt Gingrich. Rick Santorum did what we counsel client sales teams to do: Make the calls, make the ask. Romney’s positioning has consistently been that he is battling Obama and taking the high road. Santorum gained some traction over Perry and Bachman via consistency of message.

Regardless of party affiliation or ideology, marketers can learn a lot from successful (and not so successful) political campaigns.

12 Marketing Resolutions for 2012

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

As we kick off 2012, here are 12 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions to help you and your company:

  1. Embrace Social Media as part of your Marketing & PR strategy.  Focus time on creating content relevant to your target audiences and on learning about your marketplace. Less Angry Birds and fun Facebook stuff, more content development and information gathering.
  2. Use LinkedIn as a resource for Pre Call Prep, prospecting, networking and competitive analysis. The online professional network is a must for entrepreneurs, marketers and senior leaders.
  3. Build a keyword rich LinkedIn profile that tells your story enhances Search Engine Optimization.
  4. Instead of just signing up and following celebrities on Twitter, organize your followers by category and scan for valuable content. Retweet what you think is valuable and use other information to enhance your marketing and selling efforts.
  5. Develop a content strategy for Twitter. Decide what key messages you want to convey and develop a schedule to do so. Create an inventory of tweets to increase awareness and follower base.
  6. Use Facebook for more than pushing information out. Keep abreast of what interests key target audiences and create two way conversations by asking their opinion. Make customer success stories shareable. Address negative comments quickly and honestly.
  7. Contrary to what some think, email isn’t dead and can be an important part of your marketing and selling strategy. Drill down into your target markets and create email messages that show what’s in it for them.
  8. Commit to staying current with Social Media tools. It doesn’t have to be a huge time investment–an hour or two a week that’s convenient to you can make a big impact.
  9. The tenets of successful messaging apply to Social Media. Tell your story with clear and succinct messages that resonate with your target audiences and stay consistent with your overall brand.
  10. Use Social Media to make customers and employees an extended part of your Marketing Team. As Social Media becomes more a part of our lives, we use our online network to share opinions quickly and easily. Manage these relationships and leverage Social Media so customers and employees spread the good, rather than bad, word about products and services.
  11. Incorporate Mobile into your marketing strategy. Online purchasing is moving to mobile. Google estimated 44% of last-minute holiday shopping came from smartphones or tablets. Mobile provides a great opportunity to market to unique, segmented audiences at or near their time of purchase.
  12. This year, make sure you live up to your New Year’s Marketing Resolutions.

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.

Promoting Colorful Holiday Shopping

Posted on by Dave Mastovich

Solutions to help you grow…

Here’s the new retail riddle: What is Black, Green, Brown and Cyber all over?

Color coded holiday shopping days.

Everyone knows Black Friday, the beginning of the traditional holiday shopping season. Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following Black Friday and was created in 2005 by the National Retail Federation to increase online sales. Supposedly we would eat our turkey on Thursday, go shopping Friday and then shop online Monday while at work or relaxing at home.

Green and Brown Monday are probably less familiar. Green Monday refers to the first Monday in December, typically the busiest online shopping day of the year. Brown Monday is the following week and refers to when retailers start dramatic markdowns to push holiday merchandise out the doors.

The titles are colorful but how accurate are they?

Black Friday has become an event in itself and its start time keeps getting earlier and earlier. But surprisingly it usually is not the busiest shopping day in terms of customer traffic and retail sales. The Saturday before Christmas, known as The Saturday before Christmas, typically ranks first while Black Friday is usually the fifth to tenth busiest day.

Online sales do increase on Cyber Monday but the biggest online shopping day is actually December 14th-the shipping deadline to receive gifts by the 25th-which also happens to be Brown Monday this year.

Now that you are either frustrated or confused, here’s the relevance from a marketing standpoint:

The National Retail Federation identified a creative selling opportunity via online sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. They wisely defined their target market as potential shoppers who could shop online from work or at home that day. They developed a simple, yet memorable message (Shop Online on Cyber Monday!) and utilized a coordinated mix of PR, advertising, promotional discounts, online marketing and word of mouth to effectively communicate that message again and again.

Now Cyber Monday is part of our vernacular and online sales have continued to grow that day each year. While it might not be the biggest online shopping day just yet, Cyber Monday could very well reach that goal in the future.

Then what?

 

David M. Mastovich, MBA, is the president of Massolutions, a Pittsburgh based Integrated Marketing firm that focuses on improving the bottom line for client companies through creative marketing, selling, messaging and customer experience enhancement.