Some of the more interesting factoids presented in this white paper are:

1. Business Wire issued more than 288,000 press releases in 2009, and it estimates that a million more were sent out by other news services. One study suggests that a whopping 1.7 billion are sent out via email annually.

2. The news release has morphed into a multi-purpose marketing tool. When treated as an interactive web page with links, multimedia and tags, can perform and deliver results from multiple platforms and devices: the computer, the television or your mobile phone.

3. A decade ago, a news release would sit at the altar of journalists, hoping to be “picked up,” rewritten and published. Today, it’s likely to skip gatekeepers altogether and jump straight to the screens of target audiences.

4. As more and more journalistic gatekeepers have been downsized or laid off, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have assumed a role as community plaza where information is shared and exchanged. Skim any social networking site – or simply search the word “news release” on any of these sites, and you’ll find that releases account for a hefty percentage of content.

5. Treating your release like an interactive webpage can further amplify your message/content and its usefulness. Links to a chart, map or URLs that direct readers to deep content on your website can enhance the understanding of your product, service, company or point of view.

6. Business Wire asserts that one of the most important things you can do to get your press release to stand out is add a logo, graphic, photo, video or other multimedia element. Its internal research shows that press releases with any kind of graphic or multimedia generate 2.5 times as many clicks as text-only releases.

I recommend this white paper to anyone still wondering about the currency and power of the news release, which has come a long, long way since the first one was issued 104 years ago by Ivy Lee for the Pennsylvania Railroad (see my first blog entry  ”News Release Evolution: In The Beginning” for details on this historic event.)  This white paper can be downloaded at no charge at http://glomosome.businesswire.com/

For each release, he counted the words in the body, the date and time of release, whether the release included a photo, and so on for a total of seven main traits.

The “Average” Hit Release: Across the board, these releases were an average of 642 words, with the longest being nearly 1500 words and the shortest being just over 250 words. The word counts were quite evenly distributed as well, and there didn’t seem to be any word count exceptionally more likely to hit than another. In total, 58% of releases were over 500 words.

The most common day of the week to release was Thursday, which was the date of choice for 22.5% of releases. Tuesday and Wednesday were close behind with 20% of releases each and Monday and Friday were slightly less likely at 17.5%. Just one lonely hit was released on a Saturday and no hit releases premiered on Sundays.

Moving on to the best time of day (rounding to the nearest hour), 10am and 12pm ET were tied for the most frequent, each with 12.5% of releases. Additionally, 40% of all the hits were released before noon, 35% between noon and 3pm, and 25% from 4pm onward. It looks like news consumers tend to be early risers, so get your release out during the workday if you can.

The Seven Traits from Top to Bottom:

1) 87% of releases included at least one link in one form or another in the body of the release, with many of the top releases containing quite a few very descriptive links. If your company happens to be a holdout in the release linking game, I hope this may persuade you to start adding descriptive links to your press releases.
2) 73% of releases incorporated some special formatting within the body of the release, whether it be bold, italics, underlining or an embedded image. In today’s xhtml world, special formatting can be an excellent way to emphasize key points of your releases, break your content into distinct sections and provide cues for ‘skimmers’ to gather meaning as they quickly scan content for relevant information.
3) 68% of releases had a subheadline. This stat was the most surprising to me. The subhead seems to have an unclear role in press release SEO, since it’s not really the headline and not really the body either. While the robots digesting releases may not pay it much mind, it’s clear that the subhead offers valuable supplementary guidance to readers as they consider whether to continue on reading a release and possibly even share that release.
4) 58% of releases included the company name in the release headline (Ex. Company X releases XYZ app). Of course, this also means that 42% didn’t include the company name and still performed quite well with readers. There is very little real estate available within your headline and if it is more than 22 words you might not make it into Google News. With this in mind, consider the goal of the release and campaign when making your choice. If company branding is a chief concern, including the name is probably a good idea. However, if the focus is more product or service focused, for instance, maybe the company name should take a back seat.
5) 35% of releases included a photo or video, with the vast majority of those including a photo only. It’s safe to say that much fewer than 35% of all releases include multimedia, so it’s clearly a good idea to include multimedia in order to help your releases stand out. Product photos, charts, infographics, company executives, high-resolution logos . . . the list of possibilities is nearly endless.
6) 23% of releases encouraged social sharing or engagement within the body of the release, typically Facebook or Twitter. All EON releases already offer social sharing chicklets covering all major social networks, so it’s not absolutely critical to give them additional emphasis within your release. However, if social engagement is a priority or your release is geared towards “sharability”, why not give readers a bit more of a push?

7) 5% of releases, just two, had any special characters in the headline. So perhaps adding special characters in headlines is not a good idea.

Judging from Miller’s study, the news release is not only alive and well — where basics still apply — but it is thriving on the Internet as it offers opportunities to hyperlink to expanded useful information.

The ugly truth is a lot of “sales leads” go right into the trash can without even being opened.  I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.  And at the same time they’re going in the trash, some media buyer back in marketing is listening to a sales pitch telling him that XYZ media  is delivering thousands of qualified leads coming in from the company ads and press releases.  What’s going on here?

When you drive by a billboard on the freeway, are you counted as a sales lead?

Of course not.  You may not have even noticed the billboard, let alone read and internalized the message.  Even then, you may not be in the market for that product or service.  The same thing is true of readers responding to ads or visiting the company website.  If they have not been qualified in some way, they’re basically just people driving down the freeway.  Of course in the case of the website, unless the visitor registers in some way, you would never have their contact information anyway.

The qualification process turns freeway traffic into real leads

My first job in marketing was running a little digital chip line.  I did everything from set the prices to get the datasheets written and published, train the salespeople on the line, etc.  And during the average day a half-dozen potential customers would call in looking for information on the line.  Usually they had seen an ad or a press release reprinted in one of the trade Gee-Whiz magazines.  One step up from freeway traffic — they had at least seen the billboard and read it.

During the discussion that followed, at some point they would request more information, typically in the form of datasheets.  This was before the web, so that meant mailing them copies.  And that meant they had to give up their address.  Someone that has just given you their mailing address will almost always give their phone number too, if you just ask for it.  Sometimes they’d ask for prices, and while I normally don’t believe in giving out pricing directly from marketing to customers (it should always go through sales), it was hard to avoid.  But we had a printed price list for small quantities, and I could give those out without stepping on anyone’s toes… those prices were on the high-side so the salesperson always had the ability to “work the pricing” for the customer.

Now I had to write this stuff down somewhere.  I did it during the phone call on forms I had created (in those days that just meant drawing some lines on a piece of paper with labels and running off a hundred or so on the copy machine).  At the end of the call, the form was handed to my secretary and magic happened… literature got sent, and… this is important… a copy of that form went to the appropriate salesperson in the field.  Knowing the mailing address automatically meant we knew who the closest salesperson was.  They got the copy, saw that literature had been mailed, what had been discussed, what the application was, etc.  After a week, the salesperson picked up the phone and called the prospect to be sure the material had arrived and see if they had any questions.  Now that’s a sales lead.

Real sales leads deserve follow-up

In those days offices across the country all had metal desks and on the top left side was a pullout panel that people invariably taped the office phone list to.  In my case, I kept a sheet of paper listing the deals going down that week for my product line, organized by sales area.  Each customer name was followed by two numbers which represented my worst-case and best-case guesses of the size in dollars of the deal.  About twice a week I would get into the office early… 5am (I live and work in California so 5am Calif time was 8am in Boston, Baltimore and Florida).  I’d call the sales offices on the East Coast and chat with the sales people about the deals going down in their area, what remained to be done, what was holding up the close, etc.  And then I’d run through the forms of customer phone contacts from their area, and we’d chat about their applications, who the competition was, etc.  After an hour, I’d start on the Midwest sales offices, and work my way across the country.  Those two things… the phone forms that were my version of sales leads and the followup phone calls once or twice a week made the whole thing work.  I believe that they were the real reason for my success and everything else was just details.

What makes up a real sales lead?

A real sales lead should have the complete contact information… enough so you can figure out who in the salesforce should get it, and enough detail that they can contact the prospect.  It should have a brief description of their application — how they plan to use the product.  And it should state what the next action is… follow up phone call, etc.  Those things are the bare minimum.

Of course the process does not need to start with a phone call.  It might happen at a trade show.  Most people walking the aisles have their badges swiped at booths of interest, but these are the freeway people.  The real sales leads are the people who are willing, or best of all volunteer their business card.  You can write a couple of cryptic words on the back, and bingo… a real sales lead.  A walking, talking prospect who is asking to be contacted (that’s why the business card instead of a badge swipe).  Pure gold.

We’ve talked about how traditional advertising in space-ads in trade magazines and TV is not effective when trying to reach narrow demographic segments.  For this, techniques like direct mail were used.  You would use a list containing just the names and addresses of the category you needed and simply send them your material.  To give you an idea of how this worked, I used a list service called TIDS — Technical Information Distribution Service.  TIDS had the names of over 100,000 designers in the electronics community, and had them all sorted by company, company size, title, etc.  Then they had those people fill out a questionnaire that listed all of the possible categories of products… they could pick as many as they wanted.  These were the product categories they were interested in receiving material on.

In the case of reaching the 100 engineers designing disk controllers, all we needed to do was call TIDS and instruct them to sort on that product category.  They would give me the exact number of people in their database and we’d send them the material to send.  Talk about targeted!

To give you an idea of just how targeted, I once saw AMD use a TIDS mailer to recruit some hard-to-find analog designers.  It turned out there were very few in the country, but a group was working at Harris Corp in Melbourne, Florida.  AMD prepared a recruiting ad and sent it out as a TIDS mailing.  It looked like it had gone to the entire country, but in fact only about ten copies were actually sent… all to the zip code of Harris.  If Harris realized the ad had only been sent to a few of their employees, they would have been upset, but they never knew.  You might wonder how I happened to know, but let’s just say that chip marketing in Silicon Valley is a small community.

Using Search Engine Ads

TIDS is long gone, and as much as I bemoan their disappearance, direct mail has pretty much disappeared too.  Fortunately there is a new way to do this, in many ways better than TIDS.  That way is buying search ads on sites like Google.  Think about it.  We never really knew if the people that checked the box on the TIDS questionnaire for 16-bit microcontrollers were really using them… they might have just been casually curious.  Personally I would guess that at least half of the checked categories on those questionnaires fell into the  casually curious area.  But if you were to buy the search term for 16-bit microcontrollers, you can be pretty sure the people are more than just casually curious… they’re so curious they’ve taken the time to type that term into the Google search box.  That’s a LOT better.

Of course, limiting these people to just those in Melbourne, Florida gets tricky, but why bother?  You could just as easily have bought the search terms covering people looking for employment as analog designers.  That would actually be a wider, richer net than just the Melbourne zip code.

Advertising and Direct Mail are NOT Dead

Although a glance at the size of most magazines today show a big drop, there are still products that are well suited to conventional space ads.  Remember that because of the fixed ratio of ad pages to editorial pages, a 10 page drop in ad pages probably results in an addional 10 page drop in editorial pages too — a total of 20 pages!  Look at the ads that are left.  The cigarette ads have disappeared, the car ads are greatly reduced, but beer still sells well in all of the broad audience publications.  And there’s still lots  of travel and medication ads.

Direct mail has fallen off a lot due to a combination of higher postage rates and folks’ growing ability to just ignore it and toss it, unopened.  Traditional wisdom was that direct mail response rates were around 1% (1% of the mail sent out resulted in sales), but I think that was always pretty optimistic.  I’ve done this stuff from time to time and the average was closer to 0.5%.  In fact, I always designed these campaigns to break-even at a response rate of 0.25%.  Catalogs have always done far better than this though.  I’ve seen many cases of 2+%, and have heard of catalogs that ran in the 4-5% response rates.  Not surprisingly, the direct mail I do still get is largely made up of catalogs.

Will eBook readers increase America's appetite for books?

According to a survey for the AP in August 2007, 27% of Americans did not read a single book in the previous year… not one.  You wonder who these people are til you remember that statistically 50% of the people you pass on the street are below average.  Still… I mean, COME ON.  I had been wondering about this for a long time when I came across the numbers in a NYT article from 1/27/08… I had clipped it and forgotten it.  Another 27% read 15 or more books.  But here’s the real shocker (to me)… 8% of Americans read more than 51 books a year!

Now I read a lot, at least I thought I did.  A really bad year for me is 15 books… that’s what I did in 2007.  Typically though, I’ll get through around 25.  My record until this year was 41, but in 2008 I passed it and read 43.  I know this because for 30 years now, I’ve carefully written down the title of every book I read each month.  My goal was 52… one per week, and as you can see, I’m still trying.

Reading Rules

I’m pretty anal about that list.  To get on it, I have to read every bit of a book… 19 chapters out of 20 doesn’t make it, though I generally skip the Foreword.  No skimming either.  Although I’m fairly fast — I average a page a minute day in and day out — I still read every word… none of that speedreading stuff where you sort of scan a line without mentally seeing individual words.  I want to actually hear every word, if only in my mind.

Early on I had to set rules about what sort of things counted.  For instance, although I occasionally read a play or movie script, I don’t count them… they’re too short.  Figure it out.  A play or movie goes 90 minutes tops.  They’re printed roughly a page per minute of performance… that is, with all sorts of double spacing and short lines of dialog.  If you can watch a play in 90 minutes, you can read it a heck of lot faster… for me in about 45 minutes.  That’s too short to put on my list.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, I DO count, but only if I’ve done some serious backup reading and study on the play in question.  Doing that, reading the account of the period in Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People for instance, plus working through all of the word lookups, etc., turns one of Shakespeare’s histories into a long afternoon.  OK, that’s long enough to put on my list.

I also count most audio books… books on tape… audible dot com.  I load them onto my iPod and listen to them while walking the dogs or even driving.  Those books are typically 6 to 10 hours long, and that works out to a lot of pages and ergo… they make the list.  I find fiction and simple business books work well in the audio format, but books with a lot of charts and maps don’t make it.  I once read Churchill’s 6-volume History of World War II, and tried doing one of them as an audio book… it didn’t work because you couldn’t see the maps.  Most of the books I listen to, I also own in conventional paper form.

Enter the Kindle

I’ve used eBook readers before and love them.  Many years ago my wife gave me one of the early units made by RCA, I believe.  It had its faults, but I found it to be wonderfully handy.  The form factor was spectacular, and the way it fit in your hand was a marvel.  You could set bookmarks by electronically dog-earing page corners.  You could tap a word on the screen and a little window would pop up with a dictionary definition and a pronunciation guide.  You could dial the font size up and down so you could read without glasses.  In fact, in all but two ways it was an incredible little device.  The first was the memory was limited so you could only put in one book at a time.

You would think that one book is enough, but both my wife and I are used to packing a lot of books when we take off for a long weekend or more.  When I go to Reno to show horses for a week in July, we each pack a large cardboard filing box with the books we want to be available.  Not that we’ll read them… at least more than a couple… but we have no idea what we’ll be in the mood for and we want choices… a couple books of the several genres we each read.  That takes a lot of space and certainly adds a ton if we’re packing for an airplane trip.  If the eBook reader could store a dozen books or so, it would be perfect… a HUGE space and weight saver.

The other problem was that there were not many titles available, and in the end that was the killer for me.  To be really useful, you need most if not all of your books to be available in the appropriate electronic format.  The Kindle has solved both of these neatly.  You can store more books than anyone could conceivably need over the course of a month.  And, at last count, there was well over 200,000 titles available and the list was growing by leaps and bounds every day.

Sales of the Kindle were fairly slow until Oprah endorsed it around Christmas time.  That was about the same time I mentioned to my wife I’d like one for Christmas myself.  What I got was an IOU… Amazon shipments are now out to March.  OK, I can wait.  I have my iPod… currently “reading” Outliers on it.  And of course there are stacks of books… the 20th century kind… waiting for me.  This is the year… 52 books… 52… I can feel it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.