The silver lining on the previous two year’s sales recession has simply been that they have allowed for a “cleanup” on the marketing aisle. Each budget cut eliminated one more “legacy” program from the marketing plan. Fundamentally, many brands are now spending only on items that have proven to be essential to corporate success. With the recession seemingly receding, the question on the table is “where next?” The answer shouldn’t automatically be restoration of all the old programs to their prior spending levels. Let’s be honest, not every program that we deemed essential proved to be that. In fact, if your market share went up while your spending went down, there is some logic that says less is now officially more.

Here’s the reality. None of us know precisely which part of our marketing budget is producing with greatest impact. Much like with a great meal, it’s a combination of the individual elements that lift our brands. Some of those elements are directed at customer acquisition. Some at customer retention. Some at purchase activation. And others at community building. When we stir the marketing pot, we know we need the alchemy to blend seamlessly together to make the brand message relevant, involving and ultimately persuasive. 

Here’s a thought for how to rebuild the marketing program now that budgets are once again flowing more freely (or when the budgets flow more freely).

First, align your thinking along the four core points of contact: point of discovery, point of sale, point of use and point of discussion.  Develop strategies and tactics to make your brand most visible at each of these discussion points. Challenge yourself (or your team, or your agency) to develop programs that deliver the brand message effectively at each point. Develop more ideas than you can possibly execute. Forget the budget at this point, just find big honking ideas that make your mouth water with anticipation for sharing them with customers/consumers. Once you have completed reviewing all your “what if’s,” put an approximate cost next to each line idea (line item for those of you who don’t follow my clever renaming ploys). Gather your team and, as best as possible, assign a priority to each line item. Then rank the projects in order of the total points that each idea generated from the response of the team.

Now put the budget next to the line items. Reshuffle the deck to make certain that you have each of the four points of contact covered. If you had a hole, or just didn’t think the ideas generated against one of the four discovery points were strong enough, send the team back to solve that problem. 

Then stack the selected projects/programs together for the basis for your marketing budget for the upcoming year. If management asks for reductions, your prioritization of projects should allow for a quick and direct response. If management loves the work and expands the budget to allow for additional ideas, the projects that you left behind from the top of your “ranking structure” can be brought forward with relative ease.

I’ve taken to looking at budget cuts as breath mints. They allow us to get rid of the excess that we allow to build up in the traditional expansion modes. (Do everything we did last year, and then add one new initiative to the plan.) How we rebound from the marketing recession in 2009 is going to tell us how well we do in the expansion of 2010. 

Go ahead. Complete that cleanup on the marketing aisle. Instead of restoring legacy programs, reapportion the entire marketing plan based on your best prioritization of new tactics. That way, when the manager comes to review the progress of the cleanup, she’ll find a fresh new merchandising approach that elevates the aisle to a higher level instead of the previous mess.

Initially when I applied the analogy to marketing, I saw the heavens as a metaphor for consumer touch points. Consider each star a point of information about a brand. Each random, each believed to be true at that point. Some points are positive. Some points are negative.  My initial thought was that marketing’s mission was to “touch” the conversation at each point. In short, wherever a person went to gather information, marketing should shape the discussion.

Now when I consider the analogy, I choose to see the sky in clusters or constellations. It helps to keep all these touch points from seeming so overwhelming.  Rather than thousands of touch points, I now visualize four specific clusters, each demanding a different style of communication:

> Points of Discovery

> Points of Sale

> Points of Use

> Points of Discussion

As with the night sky, these are not linear destinations. We find brands of interest to us at each touch point. Brand discovery happens randomly. That said, we can shape the discovery process to lead a potential purchaser to our desired outcome simply by applying the 5Cs (Curiosity, Confidence, Connection, Conversation, Community) appropriately at each of the four touch points.

We can’t be certain when a prospective customer will find our brand, but we do know that discovery should increase curiosity. Once I’ve found a product, I naturally want to learn more about it.  So before I decide if the brand is right for me, I am going to find other people who, like me, have purchased it and speak with them about their experience. When possible, I’m going to try it before I buy it … and many times that will bring me into contact with others who are making the same purchase decision. I’m not just going to evaluate the sales materials that tell the brand story. I’m going to consider the sales environment, the sales staff, and the other prospective customers. When I use the product, I’m evaluating it based on my expectations of its performance, through the lens of my prior brand education.

As a marketer, I want to make certain that the picture is painted consistently. At each of the four contact points, branding elements are going to align appropriately to help define prospective purchaser expectations. When prospects turn to the “Point of Discussion,” I’m going to monitor the conversations, accept legitimate criticism, participate only when invited to or to correct an egregious falsehood.  As a marketer, I simply can’t appear to be big brother. Rather, I have to be a resource for information, as opposed to a brand advocate.

That brand advocacy role switches strongly into gear at point of sale. I can’t afford to bury my message there. Somehow the brand must get elevated above the clutter. That execution changes per selling environment, but if the brand message is lost at point of sale, the risk of losing valued customers is heightened.

There are moments in the process for stoking the flames of curiosity. There are opportunities to build confidence. Participating in the conversation appropriately builds trust. Energizing your brand loyalists to actively promote your brand increases opportunities at every level and ultimately leads to the expansion of your brand community.

As the Marketing Director at Skier’s Choice, I worked through those four points of contact daily.  I questioned my visibility at each point. Were we part of the discussion? Were we participating appropriately? Was our message consistent in each area? Did the messaging reinforce our loyalists’ confidence in our brand? Were our “guys” out there swinging the hammer for us? Had we given them the appropriate tools so that they could steer others in our direction?

Nurturing each of those points of light will lift your brand sales, reduce customer attrition and create a force multiplier on every marketing dollar spent. Extending the analogy, perhaps torturously, when we can connect a brand successfully to even a single consumer, that consumer begins the illumination process for others in his/her immediate sphere of influence. With each connection, your brand star burns more brightly, and the much-sought-after brand community begins to take on its own form without the need for corporate Tweets.

Four communication constellations. One consistent message. Delivered with a different tonality in each area. Ultimately empowering your customers to become your best outside sales representatives. Those are the highlight points from this missive.

Here’s to you lighting up your brand sky.

Lindsey Neely, Amy Bowles, Crystal Peterson, Bethany Stambaugh and Kama Korvela attended last month's Go Red for Women luncheon benefitting the American Heart Association.

Last month, a few Doe employees attended the annual Go Red for Women luncheon, co-sponsored by client Norton Healthcare, to benefit the American Heart Association. Cheers to going red!

Which would likely be true if it weren’t for unforeseeable events that range from the egregious (product failure) to the frustrating (expectation management) to the sublime (boredom).

In many a retail workshop, I have repeated the line “don’t settle for the sale, reach for the relationship.” Why? Product loyalty is easily shifted. But brand loyalty, loyalty to a person or a group of like-minded people, is a much more lasting bond.

To borrow the cliché, “there are only two kinds of people” … Brand Loyalists and Brand Terrorists. The challenge is that those two groups blend together sharing opinions about products that fundamentally alter the relationship between manufacturer/retailer and consumer.

Left unmanaged, your brand simply is left to fend for itself. Which is why the art of managing Connections is absolutely critical to the marketing process.

First lets understand the context for the word Connection. The first level connection is between the manufacturer and the retailer. The second level is between the retailer and the customer. The third level is between the customer and the manufacturer. The fourth level is between the customer and other customers who have made the same brand choice. And the fifth connection level is between the customer and people who have purchased the same category of product/service from a competitive source.

Each connection requires its own contact strategy. In the short format of an e-blast (I fear that I have lost 50% of my readership at this point), I am constricted by common sense not to address each level solution. What is important to note is that these connections between each of the brand’s aligned audiences must be carefully managed. We simply must nurture  these connections to shape the natural free-flowing conversation between each audience.

Here’s the Litmus test for your marketing plan. Have you put a personal face on your brand at each point of connection? Or put another way, how frequently do you carry on a conversation (not a monologue) at each connection point?

For the record, that gives us three measures for marketing success to consider moving forward:

1.  What percentage of people who purchase a product similar to yours are curious to learn more about what you have to offer?

2. How confident are your current users that your product/service is the best answer to their needs?

3. Are you currently joined with customers and consumers at each of the five  levels of connection? Moreover, are you seeking out new and more interesting ways to connect with these people to cement the relationships?

This is the third in a series of five thought pieces about building Brand Enthusion™ through the application of the 5C’s: Curiosity, Connection, Confidence, Conversation and Community. We know that every brand has the potential to spark powerful word-of-mouth referral. Empowering your most loyal customers to become vocal salespeople for your brand is at the heart of all we do at Doe-Anderson: the House of Brand Enthusion.

Our interactive intern Brandon Stephens has a unique outlook on the industry–“Advertising is like a well prepared Photoshop document. Every layer should have a name. It will not export easily to the web. It is best to keep it simple.” Other fun facts about Brandon: He’s currently a senior at Ball State University and is a self-professed Mac nut. He says, “If it’s shiny and has an Apple on it, I will probably buy it.”

Favorite summertime treat: Hawaiian Shaved Ice (although he doesn’t know what happened to all of them)

Colin Schroeder joins Doe-Anderson as an Account Services intern and attends Ohio Northern University, but is originally from Wisconsin. In addition to majoring in International Business and Economics, Colin is an excellent soccer player, as he plays for his college’s team. There’s a good chance you’ll see him jotting down notes in a notebook he always carries with him—he’s planning on writing a movie at some point, so if you’ve got any good ideas, send them his way.

Favorite summertime treat: BBQ spare ribs with a tall glass of cold milk

This summer, we have two Account Services interns from Western Kentucky University—Zach Redman and Chris Nation. Zach is a senior at WKU, majoring in Marketing. When asked what advertising means to him, he says, “It’s an expression of creativity. It is thinking outside the box to strategically place, price and promote a product successfully. The end result is one of appealing value to a target audience.”

And you may have seen Zach on the small screen– a member of the local comedic inflatable costume group, The ZOOperstars!, Zach competed on the popular NBC show “America’s Got Talent.”

Favorite summertime treat: McDonald’s vanilla ice cream

Chris Nation views advertising/marketing/public relations as “the ultimate image package.” Along those same lines, he feels that “PR professionals are the new parents for today’s ideas and products.” What exactly does he mean by that? “You have a product (your baby), you let us parent it (we’re your parents) and eventually we nurture it, see it grow, offer our advice, at times see it fall and at times see it succeed, but in the end we are proud of what we have accomplished– it’s parenting. I just hope I’ll be a good daddy!”

When Chris isn’t “parenting,” he’s working towards his Masters degree in Corporate Communications at WKU, focusing on media relations and public relations. He’s also an avid rock climber and considers himself an “outdoor enthusiast.”

Favorite summertime treat: Like Brandon, Chris enjoys Hawaiian Shaved Ice

And last, but certainly not least, meet Natalie Cunningham. She majored in Public Relations and minored in Youth and Non-Profit Leadership and Theater at Murray State University. You can often find her in the middle of several projects and is passionate about creating new things—her latest project is turning old shutters into a bedroom screen.

Natalie feels that “without advertising, marketing and PR, the economy would collapse. It is the stuff that makes the world go round. We let you know about it, we keep you excited about it, and we’re there when things go wrong with it.” Well put!

Favorite summertime treat: A tie between strawberry pizza and watermelon

With that said, I’m often surprised at how rarely local businesses take advantage of local search as a way to squeeze the maximum marketing mileage out of the Run for the Roses and the whole Kentucky Derby Festival hullaballoo.

For smaller businesses in particular, local search offers a very affordable way to reach visitors to Louisville while they are making plans for Derby Week.

The idea is to use local search to make sure your business is visible, attractive and accessible to visitors coming in from out of town.

Visibility

This is where you need to make sure your business is represented in local business listings for Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Internet yellow pages, and any other directory sites that turn up when you search for “louisville hotels” or whatever your broadest local business keyword might be.

It’s also a great time to look at your business’ Web site and consider applying some local search engine optimization techniques. If you’ve got the budget for a paid search campaign, that’s another option to consider.

Attractive

Aside from simply making sure that you have a listing on the most popular online business directories, it’s important to look at the reviews of your business that are visible on those sites, as well as on travel information sites like Tripadvisor (which now has its own search engine). If there are no reviews and you’re currently doing e-mail marketing, you might consider linking to your listing pages with a “Tell us how we’re doing” request.

If there are negative reviews, you’ve got two options. For reviewers with legitimate complaints, offer to make it right. If reviewers don’t have legitimate complaints, it’s okay to tactfully respond and clear up the misunderstandings.

Accessible

If you already have listings and reviews in place, it’s still a good idea to do a review to make sure they’re accurate. Are there locations listed that you’ve since closed? Have your hours changed since the listing was originally posted? Is the contact information still accurate? If you’re linking to your home page, would your visitors benefit more from a custom landing page or a more specific interior page? There’s nothing worse than frustrating visitors who want to do business with you.

I’ve been using the Kentucky Derby as an example here, because as a Louisville advertising agency, it’s near and dear to our hearts at Doe-Anderson. But the same principles could work for South by Southwest if you’re in Austin, Texas, or for Mardi Gras if you’re based in the Big Easy.

Picking a winner is a tough proposition when you’re talking about a horse race. But using local search to make sure that you get the best bump possible in business you can from big local events is pretty much a sure thing.

We live in an open-platform world. Consumers aren’t simply interested in a product relationship. They want a company relationship. Expectations are not only tied to post-purchase satisfaction but also to pre-purchase information sharing.

I suspect that someone far more intellectually adept than me has likely termed this a “Mass Customization” era. The Dell computer business model is driven to satisfy millions of consumers one-at-a-time. When we built a tournament wakeboard boat at Skier’s Choice, our customers physically shaped it from the bottom of the hull to the top of the tower.

Confidence is established before the purchase has been made. It is shaped by marketing materials that ring true. That deliver the appropriate amount of information at the appropriate time in the appropriate place with the appropriate level of production values.

Confidence is established on message boards, through social media networks and in chatrooms and bar rooms where people gather to talk about a particular brand or service.

Confidence comes from warranties, from post-purchase product support, from brand experience and from interactions between brand users.

Confidence allows people who own particular brands or subscribe to particular services to share their enthusiasm (or disappointment) with others.
As an example, I purchased an IPhone within the first 48 hours of launch. In airports, at restaurants and in a variety of social occasions, people stopped me to ask, “What do you think? Should I get one?”

Advertising made people curious. I provided confidence for others to follow my purchase activity. (By the way, I love my IPhone. I had issues with the original. Apple provided me with a new one – for free. I love the browser. I love the ease of use. I love the wide range of apps available for it. I’m an Apple IPhone enthusionist. Ask me about my IPhone … I’m not scared.)

And there it is. Curiosity leads to purchase. Experience with the company and the product lead to confidence. Confidence leads to word-of-mouth recommendation.

By the way, I’ve now been married for twenty-one years. I guess that makes me a heckuva marketer (see, that humor thing is out there not working for me again).

Confidence is one of the 5C’s … Curiosity, Confidence, Connection, Conversation and Community. At Doe-Anderson, we believe that together, the 5 C’s are the most efficient and effective manner for building a brand … in a tough economy, in an expanding economy, in any and all economic conditions. Our next communication in two weeks time will expand on the value of the 5C’s through a thought piece on Connection.

In order to do that, we have a set of guiding principles to which we rather rigorously adhere:

1. Creating surprise and delight should never be programmatic. Rather it should stem from that moment when someone says, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” I have a story about an experience with Southwest Airlines (maybe the masters of “surprise and delight”) that typifies this point to a tee.

2. Nothing should be expected in return. That’s the one that makes most marketing people crazy, because it delinks the quid pro quo of the normal commercial relationship. Once that delink occurs, customers can become friends and friends can become advocates.

3. It doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, the more expensive it is, the more suspicious the recipient becomes. The surprise and delight should, however, reflect the value (not necessarily monetary) you place on the relationship.

4. Embrace random. It should occur with enough infrequency so that it appears spontaneous. The degree of irregularity is directly proportionate to the degree of surprise.

5. Adhere to the brand’s tenets. The surprise and delight should always be within the core values of the brand and spoken in the brand voice.

In order to execute an effort such as this, there are a few things that you have to believe:

1. Having brand loyalists (friends) is a much better long-term strategy than simply driving transactions.

2. Friends will tell their friends about your brand because they WANT to. That’s called advocacy, the holy grail of marketing.

3. Friends will forgive you when you screw up.

4. It makes the competitors nuts.

The difficulty with this enterprise is it’s hard to do and harder to sustain. And everybody in the organization wants to have a hand in it. Accounting is always telling you, you’re off budget, sales is telling you to delight them with a coupon off on their next purchase, the database people want to put a scan code on it to track it, etc., etc., etc. and the next thing you know, you’re operating not a “surprise and delight”, but a “bore and turn-off” shelf program. 

The good news is once it begins and the enterprise is flourishing, you’ll have an effort that is sustainable and scaleable and can be the key driver for your business. 

Such transparency has implications for companies and organizations as expectations rise that they, too, will provide more and more access directly to the general public through Web sites, blogs, Facebook and MySpace groups, Twitter postings and on-line interactive newsrooms. Combine these expectations with the prevalence and power of search engines, and we have a culture in which people expect to be able to find the answer to virtually any question they can imagine within seconds. With wireless Internet access, there is an understanding that the answers to all questions are literally in the air all around us at all times. Simply stated, people today expect to be able to find out anything they want to know, whenever they want to know it.

In a crisis communication situation, this expectation can pose significant tension between a company or organization’s interests and the public’s “right” to know what is going on. The company typically is scrambling to gather information in order to understand the scope, details and implications of whatever is happening, often while the crisis is still developing. The tendency of most executives is to treat the situation as an internal, private matter until they have all their facts in order and have a comprehensive course of action laid out to address the crisis. In addition, the company’s legal counsel often will advocate that as little as possible be said publicly in an effort to mitigate potential liability.

Yet the public may be clamoring for information at the same time as this internal assessment and planning is going on. Whether they are shareholders, neighbors, the news media or simply interested parties, these people expect information and regular updates. If the company stalls for time and says little or nothing, these audiences often assume the worst and conclude that there must be something the company is trying to hide. Protecting the company’s legal interests by avoiding comment is certainly a consideration, but so are the ramifications of damage in the “court of public opinion,” which, even though it may be a tired phrase, is nonetheless a vital consideration because of its long-term business implications. Any vacuum of information will be filled somehow, and it is usually in the company’s best interest to fill it themselves, even if only partial information is available.

It is possible to strike a balance that provides a degree of transparency while giving an organization time to gather more information and make thoughtful decisions. The key is to establish a channel of communication as quickly as possible, allowing interested parties to know where more information will be available. This channel may be a specific spokesperson, a regularly scheduled news conference, a Web site, an e-mail blast, a telephone calling system, or any means of disseminating information that is visible and regularly updated. A utility company recently added Twitter to its outreach efforts to customers during a widespread power outage, helping to keep a rapidly growing audience up to date and garnering praise for innovative communication.

Another expectation today is that communication will be two-way. The newer technologies in widespread use are creating unprecedented opportunities for various audiences to have actual conversations with companies, not just receive information. Accordingly, good communication channels set up during crisis events should include an element to allow feedback. This creates not only a greater sense of transparency, but also can provide valuable insight into what issues are most important to key audiences.

Once these communication channels have been established, they must be used as often as possible. Even if there is little substantive information that may be shared immediately, an acknowledgement from the organization that the situation is being addressed goes a long way toward focusing people’s attention on where their answers eventually will come from. Whatever facts can be assembled about what is going on should be included, and, if possible, the organization may provide a general idea of what the process will be as the situation is assessed.  Then, even before final courses of action or outcomes may be in place, additional messages may be delivered about how the process itself is developing.

These efforts to provide as much information as is practical or possible will provide a degree of transparency to the situation, with one critical caveat: increasingly substantive bits of information must be delivered in a timely fashion. Those wanting information are usually willing to be somewhat patient as long as there is a strong sense that real answers are on the way. But if no new information is forthcoming, early efforts to be responsive may be forgotten and the organization ultimately criticized for stonewalling.

There are many definitions of what “transparency” means for a company or organization, particularly in the context of a crisis communication situation. Making a good faith effort to share as much information as is practical typically will meet most people’s standards of being responsive - and responsible - even in the midst of a crisis.

We’ve just found out that Doe-Anderson won Best Individual Execution Obie for the Maker’s Mark Vending Machine creative.  

You can check it out at right, and read more about the 2009 Obie Awards here: http://is.gd/tERx.)   

Congratulations to Ed Neary and Bill Connelly and to everyone who worked so hard on another great piece of work.