I’m writing this post while stretched out on the sofa with my feet being kept warm by a very accommodating doberman named Roxy. I’m using a new x200 tablet made by Lenova and I’m writing it out with a pen cursive style. The handwriting recognition program built into Vista is converting my scrawls into text… flawlessly.

I’ve used a tablet before… the earlier x41… but it didn’t have enough horsepower and it was just too slow and made way too many errors. With the x200 it’s so good it recognizes stuff I can’t read myself. The very it does this is by making very good guesses at the words, I’m writing. And that creates a new issue. Since It never guesses an incorrectly spelled word, your “typos” are not simple misspellings but now consist of perfectly good words used incorrectly. And they can be hard to spot when you scan the resulting text.

This was brought home to me when reading Paul Gillin’s excellent book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing.” Paul dictated that book into his computer using voice  recognition software. And, sorry to say, it is filled with the same sort of typos I’m running into. Not misspellings but incorrect words. A friend, A.C. Ross, told me he was having exactly the same problem. I’m starting to develop new writing habits… watching the output of the text converter as I scribble.

I happen to be a very fast typist. I’ll always be able to type a LOT faster than I can write with a pen on the tablet. But I really like the ability to enter text while standing (or reclining). For me it’s another way of working and definitely easy to pick up. And of course there’s also the matter of just 3 lbs and 6 hours of batteries.

99% of the websites out there are hoping to attract advertisers.  Most will fail in this endeavor, especially in these days of sharply reduced advertising budgets, but a few will succeed and give hope to all the others.  Look at the situation through the eyes of the advertiser.  It’s easy to “buy” zillions of eyeballs. It just takes money… a lot of it.  That’s what Budweiser does…

But no advertiser is really looking for zillions of eyeballs.  The key is getting the RIGHT eyeballs.  Very few products command a market as large as Budweiser, and that means very few can utilize mediums like TV effectively.  The problem is that, for most products, most of the TV eyeballs are not potential buyers so that most of the advertising dollars are being wasted.  Let’s say you’re trying to sell spjecial chips for building disk controllers.  How many potential buyers are there for these things?  100??  And actually you don’t necessarily want to talk to buyers and purchasing agents.  You’d probably be far more interested in talking to the engineers designing these systems or subsystems to convince them to use your chip in their next design… that’s a smaller set of people and one that’s even harder to reach.  Really think you’ll find them watching Desperate Housewives?  Maybe, but so are 10 million other people and you have to pay the network for all of them too.

OK, so TV advertising is not appropriate… what next?  A good choice might be what are termed “space” ads — generally magazines.  Now you’re probably not going to advertise in Time magazine.  It has the same problem as TV… it’s too broad.  What you’d really like to find is a publication called Disk Controller News… but if there are really only 100 potential readers for this subject, it’s extremely unlikely that there would be a magazine just for them.

That means we’ll have to find a compromise magazine, one that has our 100 target readers without too many others.  To put hard numbers on this, there used to be a magazine called Computer Design with a circulation of about 80,000 readers.  Buying a full 2-page spread (so you can tell the whole story) cost about $15,000.  That meant that running our disk controller chip ad in Computer Design was costing us $150 for each of our 100 target readers… certainly no bargain.  Another way to look at is is that you’re paying for 79,900 readers you don’t care about.

To be fair, this is a terrible example to use in a space advertising environment.  The target audience is so narrow and so specialized, the numbers will always look terrible.  A real-world advertiser would never run a large ad targeted at such a narrow group of readers.  It’s just too expensive.  Instead, they would run an ad covering multiple chip families, one of which was the disk controller chip.  That would spread the cost of the ad out over many more readers.  Of course, it would also limit the message you could deliver for each chip.

But this just makes our point.  If you could find a way of targeting readers in a more effective way, it would make it feasible to promote much more specialized types of products.  That’s what the web does or at least tries to do.  Now don’t misunderstand here.  It’s very easy to spend $15,000 on a website to promote a set of complex, highly specialized set of chips.  In fact, you could easily spend much more.  But if you could somehow attract those 100 target individuals to the website, you could turn them into a community and proactively interact with them and make them part of your process, from chip design to sales cycle.  That’s a lot better than paying $15,000 EVERY time you ran the magazine ad in the hopes of catching the readers you were targeting.

When you build a website dedicated to something as narrow as disk controllers, you are essentially becoming a publisher on that subject.  In the heyday of trade magazine publishing, there were six main magazines and another dozen or so second tier publications with lower, slightly more specialized circulation.  There was no way to beat the problem of buying all those extra readers.  But with the ability to create dedicated websites, it’s as though Disk Controller News just sprang into existence.

Understanding the advertising world is key to understanding all of promotional marketing.  That’s because the principles that were developed for effective advertising carry over to all aspects of the messaging job.  What’s more the business models and even the jargon used by the new media types like web-based advertising comes directly from the old print ad world.  Finally, understanding how to message and promote in these new still-being-defined media types is a market advantage, though not one likely to last too long.

There are lots of ways of approaching ads — of categorizing them — but I’m going to suggest a simple 3-way split.  It has the advantages of being simple and at the same time can teach us something about advertising in general.  Although Mindpik specializes in marketing for tech firms, this way of considering advertising is not limited to techie ads, but works at all levels.

First, are the “life-style” ads.  Their purpose is to just get the company name out there in front of the public.  The classic contemporary case is represented in the Budweiser TV commercials that show a horse team pulling a beer waggon with a Dalmatian dog perched on the seat alongside the driver.  The sponsor here is Anheuser-Busch and the name is prominent on the waggon, but that’s pretty much it.  Now ask yourself, does seeing a team of horses and a dog normally make you thirsty for a beer?  Probably not much.  These commercials are intended to make you feel good and associate that warm, fuzzy feeling with Budweiser beer.  They’re especially effective at the holidays when the message becomes, “Merry Christmas from Anheuser-Busch.”

The biggest problem with these kinds of ads is their expense.  They work well on TV, but they assume you already know the brand name… they’re just reinforcing it.  How did you get to know that brand name?  Because you’ve already seen many, many millions of dollars of their commercials already.  It’s hard to think of a case where a tech firm has used this approach, though Intel comes close to it with their Blue Man commercials.  Remember, no real message — just motherhood and warm puppies plus the company name.

The second category is “name + message”.  In print versions of ads in this category, there is usually a provocative headline plus a simple message tied to some graphics.  There are many TV commercials in this category.  One of my favorites are the PC vs. Mac commercials being run by Apple, with two actors playing the parts of PC and Mac.  Hillarious, simple 20-second spots that make a simple message statement such as, “Vista is broken.”  Done well, these types of ads are incredibly strong.  They make their case so strongly that people talk about them around the water cooler.  That said, really great ads in this category are very, very difficult to do.  When marketing people are trying to “sell” one of these ads, they use the term “snappy” a lot.

The third category is “name + message + information”.  This is my favorite because it’s so easy to do if you have a compelling case.  Yes, make your message statement and get the company name in there, but go on to tell a real story that goes into the pros (and cons) of your product in detail.  The best of these ads get clipped by readers and passed around, and they’re ideally suited for tech products.  When these ads are criticized, it’s usually in terms of being “too wordy” or “too much copy”.

When I think of the great advertising giants, at the top of the list is David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather.  This is the agency that did the great VW ads, put the patch on the Hathway shirt man, and so on and so on.  He felt that the sole purpose of advertising was to sell.  That said, he was more than willing to break the “rules” in order to deliver that sales message.  One of those rules was to not have too much copy in an ad… no one reads a lot of copy.  Ogilvy would challenge people that he could write a full 2-page newspaper ad that was 100% copy in little, tiny newsprint and that people would read every word of it.  In fact, he would bet $20 on it… and then say, “Hold on, I’ll save you the $20… I’ll give you the headline… the headline is, ‘Everything you wanted to know about John Doe’.”  And if your name happened to be John Doe, you would, in fact, read every word of it!

These ads work well in print form, either as full-page ads or speads (2-page ads).  That’s because you need serious space to tell the whole story.  When I did these ads, I wanted to answer as many questions as possible so the next logical step for the reader was to buy or call us.  People frequently misunderstand these ads and how they work.  Someone will say, “This ad on how to design disk controllers with our chip… it’s too long.”  “OK,” I reply. “How many disk controllers do you design/build?   None… you make the chips.  Then you’re not a good judge.  This ad is for the engineers designing them, and the point of the ad is to show them in a single page how easy it is.  Let’s call someone who actually designs disk controllers for a living and ask them what they think.”

The key to these ads is to qualify the reader right in the headline.  A possible headline for this example might be, “The entire story on how to design great disk controllers.”  Now the readers that don’t happen to be disk controller designers will flip right by this ad, but those that do will pour over every word… will make copies of it and pass it around, will compare their current designs to the approach you’re laying out in the diagrams in that ad.  And you know what?  These are the only readers you really care about  — they’re your potential customers.  I like to get the company name right into the headline along with the most basic version of the message and a strong indication of who should read this ad.

In a nutshell, this is my approach to all of promotional marketing.  Identify the people you want to talk to… call them out by job title or applications area… and then tell them a complete and compelling story.

Next up… demographics.

In many low-tech industries, mention marketing and people think of advertising.  That’s not true in tech companies who tend to be organized around marketing viewed as Product Marketing.  That said, tech companies still do promotions and that certainly includes traditional advertising.  In many companies this activity is grouped with other related activities and labeled “Marketing Communications,” or MarCom for short.

Some of the things that typically fall under this group include but definitely not limited to:

• Advertising
• Public Relations
• Literature including data sheets, catalogs, brochures and sometimes annual reports
• Trade shows
• Preparation and coordination of industry trade show papers and presentations
• Managing the annual sales meeting
• Give-aways like T-shirts and other branded items
• Logo designs
• Tag lines
• Package designs
• Website creation and management
• and these days,  Presence on social networks

In some companies this can also include things like the logistics (location and staging) of the annual shareholders meeting, company parties, award ceremonies, etc.  One of the reasons all of these things are handled by one group is that group has the resources.  Generally they engage an advertising agency and sometimes a separate public relations agency.  In more sophisticated groups they will also hire an outside design agency to “design” templates for things like data sheets and catalogs.  Design agencies are frequently called in for specific jobs like brochures and especially for annual reports.

When I joined Intel it was to create that group — I called it the Merchandising Group though it would become known later by the more traditional term, MarCom.  Intel was running at $50M a year and doubling every year.  They had about 1500 employees many of which were offshore building parts, but that headcount was also doubling every year.  That meant that after just 12 months you had seniority over half of the people you passed in the hall.  The fact that Intel had gotten this large without a central group working literature, for just one example, was amazing.  Everyone in marketing was doing their own stuff working with outside services called paste-up shops, and everything looked different.  For one thing they had that “ransom note” look — I counted 9 different type fonts, styles, and sizes on the front page of one data sheet alone.  But just as bad, they didn’t look like they came from the same company!

I’m a big believer in having a “designed look” for a company.  Years ago I found myself on the Orient Express from Paris to Milan on, believe it or not, a sales trip.  It was quite an experience but one of my most memorable impressions was the look and feel of everything from the inlaid wood in the compartments to the towels in the bathrooms and the appointments in the dining and club cars.  They were all designed and executed by YSL — Yves St Laurent — and the consistency made everything look like it belonged.  That’s what I want to see in any company we’re involved with.  Getting that designed look is far less expensive than you would think, it’s mostly just knowing to ask for it.  This is the kind of thing that having a good MarCom group does for you.

In the next couple of postings (I haven’t written them yet so I don’t know how many) we’ll look at the basic things this group does.  But basically they all revolve around the concept of messaging.  If anyone but me understood it, that’s what I’d name this group — the Messaging Group.  But since people don’t get that, I tend to call them the Promotional Group.  I refuse to call them the advertising anything, because in many companies they really don’t do any advertising per se.  But they certainly do everything else on that list.  Now having brought up the subject of messaging, let’s focus on that.  This is a 3 part process.

First, you need to figure out the content of the message, not the exact wording, but what the message is supposed to convey.  And that content is not determined or set by the Messaging or Promotional Group.  It is determined by Product Marketing in conjunction with company management.  It says things like, “we build microprocessors for embedded applications that provide orders of magnitude more performance than competitors but sell for under $10.  While the applications we go into have been done before, they have never been done economically in a commercially successful product because of the expensive computing power required.”  OK, that’s some real content (literally real — we wrote it for a past client).  Unfortunately it’s not something you can put on a postage stamp or a T-shirt.  This content is delivered to the Promotional Group — it’s their input for the messaging process.

The second step is creating a memorable message from this.  The marketing poetry that people will hear and remember and associate with the brand.  “Intel delivers” and “Intel inside” are marketing messages that imply all sorts of things — hopefully positive things to the people on the other end of that message.  The promotional group creates these messages from the content provided to them.  A friend of mine, Andy Arbuckle at Borders, is a poetry fan.  I asked him once to define poetry, and he told me that it had been defined (by others) as “words made memorable.”  That’s what you’re aiming for here.  Marketing poetry.  Branding messages made memorable.

The third step is delivering that message to a mass of people.  You can certainly do that through advertising, but it’s just as important that every press release, website page, product package, conference presentation, etc. — they ALL have to carry that message, some more overtly than others, but they HAVE to be CONSISTENT.  This third phase is also owned by Promotional Marketing.  They receive the intention — the content — and create a memorable message, a tag line, around that message and then find ways to get it to the absolute maximum number of key people.

In future posts, we’ll discuss the ways that message is actually carried to the world of customers and prospects, editors and analysts, friends and wives.

Here in Silicon Valley we have an interesting group of car washes.  Maybe it’s the same all over the country, I have no idea, but some of our car wash spots here have themes.  There’s one called the Delta Queen which is built to a very realistic approximation of an old paddlewheel riverboat.  The one in my neighborhood is a reconstruction of the buildings that occupied the corner 40 years ago when it was mainly orchards, accurate right down to the live chickens in the coop.  Fun stuff.  I’ve been going there on an occasional basis for years.

Originally you pulled in and a kid with a clipboard talked you through the choices… just a wash or do you want wax too… what about the interior… want us to make the tires look black again?  Pretty simple and took just a second.  But as they became more popular the range of services got more extensive… too extensive for a quick chat with clipboard Bob.  Then they added a touch of product marketing and “productized” the service.  They grouped the services into a couple of different lists… one was called “The Classic” and another, “The Works.”  All together these days there’s about five of these, so nowdays the conversation with Bob goes along the lines of “I’ll take the works.”  OK.  Done.

Now notice what the operation did NOT do.

1. They did not name the offerings with numbers.  No one had to pull up and say, “I’ll take 9047LPDTL,” for instance. No, that would be what a chip company would do.  Instead they came up with simple, easy to remember names… what a breakthrough!

2. They put up a big sign with the prices… “The Works… $19.95.”  This set people’s expectations right up front, since they could see the sign and vector themselves into the level of wash they felt matched what they felt like spending.  Simple.

I frequently talk to companies/clients that want to hide the price from people until they have pretty much convinced them to do the deal… at least that’s what they think.  In my experience, people recognize this and resent it.  You can save everyone sooooo much time by just getting the price out up front.  If people have a real need, they’re not going to run.  Putting the prices out in a visible way also settles the question of upgrades.  If one product costs $19.95 but the premium version only costs $21.95 and PEOPLE SEE THAT AT THE BEGINING, a much higher percentage will want the premium.  This is much easier than trying to upsell them later.

By grouping the services this way, you’re sending a subtle message to people that these are the things other customers tend to choose.  That’s comforting and saves lots of explanations.  Now Bob never refuses to sell you something.  But it’s a lot easier for the customer to say, “I want the Classic but skip the phony new car deoderant… it makes me sneeze all the way home.”  Bob has only one response to anything you say… “Got it.”  I sometimes tell people that a good way to approach marketing is to find out what’s easiest to sell, and then find ways to make it easier yet.

Actually I hate being exposed to sales people that try to pretend they’re not in the sales mode.  This happens frequently on the phone when someone starts the conversation with, “Are you having a good day?”  What the heck does that have to do with anything?  This is a stranger talking… does he think I’m fooled by this opening?  What an idiot.  When I’m in the sales mode the “opening” I tend to use the most is just a casual, “I’m here to sell you something.”  That usually shocks people into a listening mode for a minute, and it’s so novel because it happens to be the truth.  Sometimes when I’m in a particularly expansive mood, I’ll make it, “I’m here to sell you something.  I like to get that out right up front so there’s no confusion about what I’m doing here.”

This has never — not once — resulted in the other person ordering me off the premises.  About half the time it provokes a chuckle.  For me it has always resulted in the other person giving me their attention and listening, but I don’t offer this to you with any sort of guarantee… just the opinion that trying to hide the sales intention is terminally stupid.